Rebecca "Becky" Gurley Bace was an American computer security expert and pioneer in intrusion detection.
14 Facts About Rebecca Bace
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Rebecca Bace spent 12 years at the US National Security Agency where she created the Computer Misuse and Anomaly Detection research program.
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Rebecca Bace was known as the "den mother of computer security".
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Rebecca Bace was influential in the early stages of intelligence community venture capital and was a major player in Silicon Valley investments in cyber security technology.
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Rebecca Bace's mother was a war bride from Japan following World War II and her father was a self-educated teamster from Alabama.
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Rebecca Bace credited a local librarian and family friend, Bertha Nel Allen, for the encouragement to apply for college and scholarships.
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Rebecca Bace won scholarships from charitable foundations set up by Betty Crocker and Jimmy Hoffa in her senior year of high school, and in 1973 she was accepted to the University of Alabama at Birmingham as the only woman in engineering.
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Rebecca Bace first became interested in computing during her freshman year working with punch cards programming Fortran and COBOL on an IBM mainframe and got her first engineering job while teaching at an engineering lab.
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Rebecca Bace was approached by a couple of Xerox technicians who needed to fill affirmative action requirements, and accepted a job as a specialist repairing copier machines.
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Rebecca Bace served as program manager for intrusion detection research, specifically on transferring research into the relatively new commercial security products market.
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Rebecca Bace played a pivotal role in the apprehension of Kevin Mitnick, proving that trace back and capture were possible beyond the theoretical context.
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Rebecca Bace provided some of the seed funding for computer security labs at UC Davis and Purdue University.
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Rebecca Bace left Los Alamos in 1998 and started Infidel, Inc.
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Rebecca Bace briefly served as Technical VP of the Cyber Security Practice for In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the US Intelligence Community, and before her death she served as chief strategist for the Center for Forensics, Information Technology, and Security at the University of South Alabama.