Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 38 | Page 11

NEWS

Girls Who Code highlights unseen contributions of women coders

The international organisation , Girls Who

Code , is highlighting the contributions of women in technology . The campaign group is seeking to shift perceptions of what a programmer looks like , while also drawing attention to the gender gap within the technology industry with women taking up just 26 % of computing jobs in 2020 .
“ There is still a perception out there that coding isn ’ t for girls , but that ’ s not true – we know that a huge part of the web was coded by women ,” said Reshma Saujani , Founder and CEO of Girls Who Code .
“ With this campaign , we ’ re hoping to inspire the next generation of women coders by showing them what the world would look like if they weren ’ t building it , designing it , coding it .
“ Because without their contributions , the world as we know it , would fall apart .”
The organisation recently launched ‘ Missing Code ’, a digital campaign that illustrated how broken the Internet would be if not for the work done by women . Girls Who Code is an non-profit organisation seeking to lead the movement to inspire , educate and equip young women with the computing skills needed to pursue 21st century opportunities . Since launching in 2012 , Girls Who Code has reached 500 million people through its work and 300,000 girls through its in-person programming .

The number of new malicious files detected every day increased by 5.2 % to 360,000 in 2020

In 2020 , globally an average of 360,000 new malicious files were detected by Kaspersky per day – an increase of 5.2 % when compared to 2019 . This was influenced mostly by a large growth in the number of Trojans ( malicious files capable of a range of actions , including deleting data and spying ) and backdoors ( a specific type of Trojan that gives attackers remote control over the infected device ) – a 40.5 % and 23 % increase respectively . These were the trends found by

the Kaspersky Security Bulletin : Statistics of the Year Report .
There was also a noticeable increase in the number of backdoors detected , as well as worms ( malicious programs that self-replicate on your system ), written on the VisualBasicScript language and usually belonging to the Dinihou malware family . On the decline globally is adware ( programs that bombard you with advertisements ), which experienced a 35 % decrease when compared to 2019 . However , some regions saw an increase in adware .
In South Africa , for example , by the end of October 2020 , the average adware notifications per user increased to more than 33 in comparison to 32 for the entire 2019 .
Kaspersky ’ s detection systems discovered an average of 360,000 new malicious files every day during 2020 – 18,000 more than in 2019 and up from 346,000 in 2018 .
Of those malicious files , 60.2 % of those were non-specific Trojans . In general , the percentage of Trojans detected increased by 40.5 % when compared to the previous year .
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