The Ada Lovelace Lecture 2026

The Center for AI Ethics is proud to celebrate Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).
This year’s Ada Lovelace Lecture will be delivered by Rheannon Lefever and Mona Petersen Skriver, both holding a MSc in Data Science and Junior Researchers at the Center for AI Ethics, SDU. Their research explores pressing questions in cybercrime, information security, human factors, and privacy.

Abstract: Cybercrime is still on the rise. Behind this growth lies a structural transformation in how cybercrime is organised. The migration of criminal activity to the internet is not novel, and cybercrime is fundamentally different in character from its physical-world predecessor. Hacking with malicious intent has evolved alongside this transformation. What was once the domain of technically sophisticated individual actors has industrialised into a service economy: Hacking-as-a Service (HaaS), in which offensive capabilities are commodified, packaged, and sold to buyers regardless of technical skill, enabling even less technically skilled individuals to launch complex attacks. The infrastructure that enables this service economy is partially hosted on the dark web, rendering them effectively invisible to the general public. The actors who populate these ecosystems are diverse in motivation, sophistication, and intent.

In this talk, we will share the findings of our study on examining who participates in HaaS ecosystems, what roles they perform, and how victims appear within them, and we will discuss both implications and lessons learned.