Female black hacker

Gigabyte

IRL Name: 

Kimberly Vanvaeck

Biography: 

Kimberly Vanvaeck a.k.a Gigabyte is a female Belgian who was credited for writing the first ever C# virus which she called 'Sharpei'. She was 17 at that time when she released Sharpei, which is designed to infect computers loaded with the .Net framework. The worm appears in an e-mail with the subject line "Important: Windows update" and the following message attached: "Hey, at work we are applying this update because it makes Windows over 50% faster and more secure. I thought I should forward it as you may like it." If the attachment is opened, then the worm uses the Outlook address book to send messages--with a copy of the virus attached--to every address in the book. It then deletes the e-mails from the sent folder and removes the copy of itself.
She lives mostly in Belgium, Brussels, but sometimes she still go home to the town where she was raised, near Mechlin. She recently graduated as a Master of Industrial Sciences (Industrial Engineer) in Electronics-ICT. Before that, she also did a Bachelor in Applied Computer Sciences. Now she works as an advisor in IT, at Erasmushogeschool Brussel.

Facts

A female virus writer with a penchant for media attention.

She was arrested by the Belgian Police a few years ago after she was discovered for creating the worm.

She is also well known for frequent run-ins with ubiquitous AV spokesman Graham Cluley over his sociological analysis of virus writers.

During her last year of Bachelor in Applied Computer Sciences, she went to Hanoi, Vietnam, to participate in a project on Multilayer Traffic Engineering, for her final work.