Rebecca Bace

Rebecca "Becky" Gurley Bace (1955–2017) was an American computer security expert and pioneer in intrusion detection. She spent 12 years at the US National Security Agency where she created the Computer Misuse and Anomaly Detection (CMAD) research program. She was known as the "den mother of computer security". She was also influential in the early stages of intelligence community venture capital and was a major player in Silicon Valley investments in cyber security technology.

Early life and education Bace grew up in rural Alabama as one of seven children and was diagnosed with epilepsy in adolescence. Her mother was a war bride from Japan following World War II and her father was a self-educated teamster from Alabama. Due to prevailing attitudes about the illness and about women, her neurologist suggested that she stay home and collect disability following high school. She credited a local librarian and family friend, Bertha Nel Allen, for the encouragement to apply for college and scholarships. She 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. 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. She 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. She played a pivotal role in the apprehension of Kevin Mitnick, proving that trace back and capture were possible beyond the theoretical context. She left Los Alamos in 1998 and started Infidel, Inc., a security consulting company. As a venture capitalist, she provided expert advice to a generation of security startups, including Qualys, Sygate, iRobot, Arxan Technologies, HyTrust, and Neohapsis.

Legacy Multiple awards have been established in Bace's memory including the Rebecca Bace Pioneer Award for Defensive Security and the Rebecca Gurley Bace SWSIS Scholarship.

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