[david_shaw]

I'm not particularly close to this issue, but the sexism I'm seeing here is pretty astounding. If this were a 16 year old guy, no one would bat an eyelid. Seriously.

Look at Mafiaboy back in 2000 -- he took down Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. I'm not even sure that he was 16 yet (I don't have his age offhand).

Is this a crazy and possibly fake story? Of course. Does that mean that it can't be true? Not by a long shot.

I work in information security, and at 16 knew a hell of a lot about SQL injection, buffer overflows, cross site scripting and oodles of other vulnerability classes. This girl didn't work alone, but part of a hacker group -- to me, it seems totally feasible.

I'm not saying that we should take every word an anonymous "16 year old girl" says on the Internet as absolute fact, but discounting this attack because it seems like a girl couldn't pull it off seems sexist and wrong. Again, if this were some pimply-faced male high schooler, no one would bat an eye.

[brazzy]

Nobody's saying that it can't be real because girls don't grok tech and 16-year-olds are stupid. They're saying it's unlikely to be realy because statistically, the number of 16-year-old girl hackers is very small (relative to 25-year-old male hackers), there's a huge history of fake personas in hacking (and especially around Anonymous), and a 16-year-old girl is a very useful persona to get attention.

[digitalvisions]

You bring up a great point - which is actually contradictory in the story. She said was hassled for being so young. I know a lot of hackers and most got started very young like you point out, and all were welcomed into the hacker community without any issues - female or not.

[aprrrr]

I'm not sure what sexism you mean specifically, but my skepticism has nothing to do with the specifics of the persona. Of course there are 16-year-old girl hackers. My wife once was one.

I doubt that the character is really a 16-year-old girl because she's telling Forbes she's a 16-year-old girl.

If 'k said he were a 16-year-old boy, I'd doubt he were a 16-year-old boy.

If 'k said she were a 33-year-old quant on Wall St., I'd doubt she were a 33-year-old quant. Etc.

I just seriously doubt that this character is giving any real identifiable information to Forbes.