Mexican Women Stand Up to Cyberattacks and Vicious Digital Violence
Ciberseguras began hosting women-only online security workshops in 2016 to have a safe space to discuss and address digital violence. Today, the participants share experiences of online harassment, stalkers and losing control over their personal information online.
In July, The New York Times reported that the Mexican government uses Pegasus spyware technology to monitor activists and journalists. While state-sponsored hacking grabs headlines, Ciberseguras has found that women face online abuse on many fronts.
Members of SocialTIC and representatives of the Take Back the Tech campaign began meeting in 2013 and launched Ciberseguras as a blog to share resources to combat online abuse. While the problem was increasingly common, many women didn’t know where to turn for help.
Even though millions of Mexicans still lack internet access, the country boasts 50 million social network users. There is no national data on the prevalence of online harassment of women, but high-profile cases in the past three years have put feminist organizations on alert. The phenomenon is so common, women have coined a term for the attackers: machitrolls. ...