She’s a skydiver, BASE jumper, public speaker, and a white hat hacker with a dark oppressive past. Doesn’t Shyama Rose remind you of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Lisbeth Salander]?
“I think the story of me and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are fairly similar. She certainly hacks people … and she has a hell of a past,” she told CNN.
Like Salander, Rose is a survivor of a traumatic childhood.
She was 11 when Rose was molested for the first time by the so-called spiritual leader at Texas’ Barsana Dham, an ashram of the International Society for Divine Love. The families who moved to the ashram in pursuit of enlightenment were brainwashed into believing that “if they said or thought anything negative against the society or against him, they could literally go to hell,” so no one came to Rose’s rescue and she was abused for the next 7 years.
“I was standing in the kitchen … wearing this gigantic sari… and he was trying to adjust it around me and he just, you know, started touching… Not only did they not stop it, they acknowledged it and promoted it. They would send us into this guy’s hands on a regular basis and told us to enjoy it.”
Like Salander, Rose is a world-class computer hacker.
Without support from her family, Rose couldn’t escape the ashram or from the clutches of the ‘God on Earth.’ However, she escaped into a Macintosh SE that her mother bought for her and learned to code, and then to hack – enduing the abuse at the same time. When she was 18, Rose went to college to pursue a degree in computer science, much to her mother’s displeasure.
“I was told by my mother that I shouldn’t go, and that I was being worldly; and that I wasn’t smart enough. But, you know, I just decided to take off and go.”
Like Salander, Rose makes a living as a computer hacker.
I say this every day https://t.co/qF5AUyGJGd
— Shyama Rose (@pencilsareneat) January 12, 2016
“I feel the need to protect because I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen in the world,” Rose told CNN. Much of Rose’s job is to think like a bad guy, tripping them up before they can attack.
At 35, Shyama is a world renowned business security leader, and a regular keynote and Information Security industry speaker. In the past she used her penetration testing roots to design and implement holistic security programs for CBS and NASDAQ.
Like Salander, Rose is an eccentric and a superhero.
Happy place, happy face. pic.twitter.com/WcPY54YvN8
— Shyama Rose (@pencilsareneat) March 29, 2016
When she skydives, Rose wears a helmet similar to what Salander wears when she rides a motorcycle around Sweden.
“A lot of people would think they’re completely different – like, hacking is completely neck up [and] skydiving is neck down. To me, they’re complementary, so I get to control both my body and my mind at the same time… I have every right to be a coked-up prostitute … but I would rather be a nerd.”
Thanks to Rose’s testimony, on March 4, 2011, the self-proclaimed God-man was convicted of 20 counts of indecency with a minor, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison for each of the 20 counts – in short 280 years behind bars. But before he could pay for his sins, he escaped and is still on the run.
Working hard, doing cool stuff, never sleeping in, and always on the go leads to happy exhaustion. Loving life atm pic.twitter.com/r0EtCpGDQ1
— Shyama Rose (@pencilsareneat) January 28, 2016
This article (Meet the Real-Life Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is a free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.
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