cybersecurity and petplay

i’ve noticed a weird amount of overlap between cybersecurity people, furries, petplay people and neurodivergent people online.

not in a “i have data proving security researchers are secretly pups” way. i don’t. i looked for it, because that would’ve been very funny, and apparently nobody has bothered doing this extremely important piece of cybersecurity research yet.

but the overlap is hard to not notice if you’ve spent enough time in these communities.

infosec has always had a lot of people with pseudonyms, weird usernames, extremely specific interests and an unreasonable amount of time spent online. furry communities are obviously very online too. petplay has its own communities, identities and social spaces. then you keep seeing the same people exist in two or three of these worlds at once.

there is at least some research around the parts surrounding this.

one study looked at 413 people who engage in pup play and used the autism-spectrum quotient short form to measure autistic traits. around half scored above the threshold the researchers describe as indicative of an autism diagnosis1.

that number needs a giant asterisk. it doesn’t mean half of people into pup play are autistic, and the paper itself says the results should be treated as preliminary because of the sample and methodology. it’s an internet survey of a specific community, not some perfect population estimate.

still, it’s interesting.

there’s research on the furry and petplay overlap too. a recent study looking at bdsm, petplay, furry and a few other interests found a significant association between petplay and furry interests2. again, not particularly shocking if you’ve actually been around either community, but apparently someone had to put it into a regression model before i could cite it in a blog post.

the part i find more interesting is that petplay isn’t really explained properly if you reduce it to sex.

a much larger survey of 733 people involved in pup play looked at how people actually participate in the community: pup identities, names, packs, social connections, gear and the distinction between the social and sexual sides of it3. a lot of people described it as something that affected how they socialised and connected with other people, not just something confined to sex.

which makes sense to me.

i’m not really looking at this from outside either. i call myself a boypup because i enjoy it. i’ve had “autistic subby boypup” in social bios while simultaneously spending most of my day doing security research and staring at http requests.

so this is obviously a very unbiased investigation.

but i think the cybersecurity part of the overlap is less mysterious than it initially sounds.

hacker culture has always been incredibly online. handles mattered. pseudonyms mattered. you could know somebody for years without knowing much about their offline life. people built entire reputations around a username and whatever weird technical thing they were obsessed with that month.

a lot of the people who end up good at security are also just obsessive about systems. you see something behaving strangely and you need to know why. you find some obscure protocol and suddenly you’ve lost an evening reading the specification for absolutely no practical reason. eventually this somehow becomes a career.

the internet was also one of the first places where being weird was actually useful.

you could find ten other people interested in the exact same niche thing you were interested in. you could use another name. you could experiment with how you presented yourself. you didn’t have to explain all of yourself to everyone around you before finding people who understood that part of you.

furry communities grew on that internet. queer communities grew on that internet. hacker communities grew on that internet. petplay communities did too.

so of course there’s going to be crossover.

i don’t think there’s some deep psychological law here where enjoying reverse engineering eventually makes you buy a collar. i’m also very suspicious of neat explanations for why groups of people behave the way they do, especially when the evidence is basically a couple of surveys and me looking at my timeline.

the neurodivergence research is interesting. the furry and petplay overlap is interesting. the rest is mostly culture and observation.

but it does explain why i can go from reading someone’s vulnerability research to opening their profile and discovering they’re also a furry, a pup, or both, and barely register it as surprising anymore.

security has always had weird people in it.

that’s probably one of the reasons i like it.

Footnotes

  1. liam wignall, rachel moseley & mark mccormack, autistic traits of people who engage in pup play: occurrence, characteristics and social connections, the journal of sex research. doi:10.1080/00224499.2023.2239225 ↩

  2. ashley brown, edward d. barker, stella friedrich & qazi rahman, a survey of the united kink-dom: investigating five paraphilic interest groups and their demographic and psychological correlates, the journal of sex research. doi:10.1080/00224499.2025.2486472 ↩

  3. liam wignall, mark mccormack, taylor cook & rusi jaspal, findings from a community survey of individuals who engage in pup play, archives of sexual behavior 51, 3637–3646 (2022). doi:10.1007/s10508-021-02225-z ↩