When people talk about the Cult of the Dead Cow, the world’s oldest and most famous hacking group, the story usually centers on a handful of guys in the 1980s and ’90s: Grandmaster Ratte’, Mudge, DilDog, the Back Orifice saga. The names most people know are male. But cDc’s history has always included women, and honestly, that’s one of the most interesting parts of the story that rarely gets told.

Lady Carolin: The First#

In the early days of bulletin board culture, hacker groups were almost universally male. The Cult of the Dead Cow was no exception, at least at first. But sometime in the early ’90s, a California teenager named Carrie Campbell, going by the handle Lady Carolin, started dialing into cDc’s BBS, Tacoland.

She caught the attention of another young member: Psychedelic Warlord, who you might know better today as Beto O’Rourke. He vouched for her, Grandmaster Ratte’ said “OK,” and just like that, cDc became one of the vanishingly few hacker groups of the era with female representation.

Campbell later reflected on it with characteristic honesty: “I joined happily, honored, and proceeded to write crappy, horrific, 16-year-old bloody t-files. I loved the community of smart people to converse with and bounce ideas off of. The acceptance of my female gender is extremely rare in the hacker scene and I appreciate it.”

She described herself as ending up “purely by accident as the only girl in the world’s most notorious hacker group.” That word, “accident,” says a lot. It wasn’t a diversity initiative. It was just a group of weirdos who judged people by what they could do, not what they looked like. In the ’90s hacker scene, that was genuinely rare.

Campbell remained active with cDc for years before stepping away from the group’s email list in 2006. But the door she walked through stayed open.

Krass Katt: Pastor of Muppets#

Krass Katt joined cDc in June 1996, making her the second woman in the group and one of the longest-serving female members of any hacker collective, period. Her official cDc bio describes her as “Pastor of Muppets, she’s pulling your strings,” and notes that “Krass Katt’s image does not show up on film.”

That’s about all the public record gives us, and that’s by design. In a group full of people who love the spotlight, Krass Katt has kept a deliberately low profile for three decades. In a world where most hacker groups from the ’90s have dissolved entirely, quietly persisting is its own form of rebellion.

Medus4: Thot Leader, Sinfluencer, Patron Saint#

Fast forward to October 2020, and Katelyn Bowden, aka Medus4, joined cDc. If Lady Carolin walked through a door, Bowden kicked it off its hinges with a flamethrower.

Her cDc bio titles include “Thot Leader, Sinfluencer, Patron Saint of Promiscuity,” and if you think that’s just attitude, you haven’t been paying attention.

Before joining cDc, Bowden founded BADASS (Bad Ass Advocates Stopping Sextortion and Stalking), an organization fighting non-consensual pornography. Her path to hacking wasn’t academic; it was personal. After being victimized by AnonIB, a site notorious for hosting non-consensual intimate images, she taught herself the digital ropes and launched an online counter-offensive that eventually helped take the site down.

That kind of origin story, using hacking skills for direct, personal justice, is about as cDc as it gets. The group literally coined the term “hacktivism,” and Bowden embodies it in its most visceral form.

In August 2023 at DEF CON 31, Bowden co-presented alongside DilDog (Christien Rioux) to release Veilid, cDc’s ambitious new peer-to-peer privacy framework. Described as “like Tor, but for apps,” Veilid represents the group’s biggest release in decades: a full-stack tool for building applications where user privacy isn’t an afterthought but the foundation. Having Medus4 front and center for that launch wasn’t symbolic. It was earned.

Jun34u: From CTFs to the Cow#

Lindsay Von Tish, known in cDc as Jun34u, joined in August 2021. An offensive security researcher, Von Tish discovered her passion for hacking through CTF (Capture the Flag) competitions during her undergraduate studies and never looked back.

She’s presented research at BSides conferences and in DEF CON’s Adversary and IoT Villages, the kind of venues where your work has to hold up under scrutiny from some of the sharpest security minds in the world.

But what stands out about Von Tish isn’t just her technical chops. She’s deeply invested in building the next generation, volunteering and mentoring through Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, and local school programs. In a field where the pipeline problem is real and persistent, that kind of hands-on mentorship matters more than any keynote.

Lodri: The Forensics Expert#

Lodrina Cherne, cDc handle Lodri, joined in August 2023. Her background reads like a cybersecurity curriculum: nearly two decades in digital forensics and incident response, a SANS Institute certified instructor, former computer forensics examiner at Arsenal Consulting, and Principal Security Advocate at Cybereason.

Cherne’s specialty is the painstaking work of digital forensics: preservation and analysis of electronic evidence across Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. She’s worked cases involving intellectual property theft, employment disputes, and evidence tampering. She’s also an Aspen Tech Policy Hub Fellow, which means she’s thinking about how cybersecurity intersects with policy, not just in the lab but in the real world where decisions affect millions of people.

Her approach to teaching emphasizes looking at investigations from multiple angles, using different tools to find as many facts as possible. It’s methodical, rigorous, and exactly the kind of expertise that makes cDc more than just a crew with good handles and sharp t-files.

She also runs “This Week in 4n6,” a community resource that curates the latest in digital forensics news, and she’s a two-time Lethal Forensicator Coin holder, an award given at SANS FOR610 to top performers. That’s not a participation trophy.

BiaSciLab: The Future Showed Up Early#

And then there’s Bianca Lewis, aka BiaSciLab, who joined cDc in August 2025 as its newest member.

Bianca first made national headlines at DEF CON 26 in 2018, when she hacked a voting machine at age 11. Eleven. Her message to America, delivered with the confidence of someone who’d just proven a point: “WORK ON YOUR COMPUTER SECURITY, PEOPLE!” The New Yorker covered it. The BBC covered it. She was wearing a t-shirt that read “No time for Barbie, there’s hacking to be done.”

Since then, Bianca has only accelerated. She was the youngest speaker ever at H.O.P.E. (Hackers On Planet Earth), has spoken multiple times at DEF CON across the Voting Village, Bio Hacking Village, and r00tz Asylum, and has presented at DefCamp and Black Hat. She founded Girls Who Hack, an organization dedicated to getting young women into cybersecurity. She also runs DCNextGen and Kids Who Code, programs aimed at making sure the next generation of hackers doesn’t look like the last one.

She’s not a mascot. She’s not a feel-good story about kids being precocious. She’s a hacker, a maker, an international speaker, and now a member of the world’s most famous hacking group. At 17.

What It Means#

The women of cDc span four decades. From a teenager on a BBS in the early ’90s to a teenager hacking voting machines in the 2020s. From an activist who turned personal trauma into a global anti-exploitation movement to a forensics expert shaping cybersecurity policy. From a security researcher mentoring the next generation to a kid who decided the next generation starts now.

They don’t form a single neat narrative. But there’s a thread: they all showed up in spaces where they weren’t expected, and they all did work that made those spaces better.

In a subculture that has historically been unwelcoming to women (let’s be honest about that), cDc has been a place where, as Carrie Campbell put it, “the acceptance of my female gender” was possible. That’s not a perfect track record. It’s not a feminist manifesto. But with six women among its current and former members, cDc is walking the walk in a way that most legacy hacker groups never did.

The dead cow has always had more than one voice. It’s about time the women got the mic.