Rebekah Brown

Threat Intelligence Lead, Rapid7

Rebekah Brown's badass resume reads like something out of a modern spy novel: former National Security Agency network warfare analyst, US Cyber Command training and exercise lead, and a crypto-linguist and cyber unit operations chief for the Marine Corps, fluent in Chinese Mandarin.

Today, as threat intelligence lead at Rapid7, Brown heads up threat intel operations across the security company. She retooled the threat intel program into a coordinated one among research, products, services, and incident response services. "We had been doing it ad-hoc," she explains.

Brown recently earned her master's degree in homeland security/cybersecurity, with a graduate certificate in intelligence analysis. Sharing her threat intel expertise and helping security pros – and prospective ones – on how to apply that information is what it's all about, she says.

"One of the things I'm most excited about is I get to do education and outreach specifically around threat intelligence," she says. "I'm very lucky because of my background and expertise [in threat intelligence] before it was called threat intelligence," Brown says. She also serves as an instructor and mentor with SANS, and she co-authored the book "Intelligence-Driven Incident Response" with SANS instructor Scott Roberts.

A recent incident response engagement Brown and her Rapid7 team were working on centered around a 13-year-old worm that had re-emerged. The old-school worm was an example of how far threat intel has come, she says. "If we had as much information back then [in 2005] as we are used to getting now, it would have been a lot easier to actually prevent [these older viruses] from continuing to be active," she says.

Brown also likes to share her other talent: music. "I come from a long line of musical engineers," she says. Her parents are pianists, and Brown plays the baritone ukulele. "I travel with it," she says. "When I do a SANS conference, I sometimes serenade my fellow instructors and students."

Brown is currently expecting her fourth child, so she is taking a temporary break from her competitive kickball league play. "I'm building my own kickball team," she quips.

---By Kelly Jackson Higgins, Executive Editor, Dark Reading