Lady Holmes

Meet Pattathil Dhanya Menon, India’s first woman cybercrime specialist, who talks to Hemchhaya De about how she fi ghts crime in the virtual world.

- Hemchhaya De

To give you an idea of how early she arrived on the scene, Pattathil Dhanya Menon’s first case involved a fake profile on that pre-Facebook era player, Orkut. “The profile was created by a little boy for his teacher and mother because they often scolded and insulted him. So this was an act of revenge.” The route that brought her to this point more than a decade ago was not a direct one. Menon was never really interested in law, even though her grandfather’s elder brother, also her godfather, a Supreme Court advocate, believed this was the path for her. The computer science graduate from Thrissur, Kerala, got an MBA in retail management and was set on quite a different career path when she found herself drawn to reports of cybercrime, a phenomenon that a newly digital India was slowly waking up to.