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CyberWire Daily
Marcelle Lee: Cyber sleuth detecting emerging threats. [Research] [Career Notes]
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My name is Marcel Lee and I'm a senior security researcher at SecureWorks. I wanted to do a lot of different things in my life and have done quite a few of them. I had one year of double E in college and that definitely wasn't for me. So at the time, like, I had never even considered like a career in computers because it just wasn't something that I grew up with at all and didn't have any concept, you know, of what a career in that field would look like. So. Yeah, but here I am now. I had a relative pass away and I was in charge of managing their estate and it was a bit complicated because there was like a household to, you know, empty and a house to sell and so on and so forth. And. But because I was getting some money from that, I was able to like, basically quit my full time gig, which was managing like capital projects for a municipality, and focus on taking care of the estate and then getting into the cyber thing because I had a little bit of funds and flexibility. The other thing that helped was I actually was part of a grant program and I think it was through the county that I live in, but it was federally funded and this was just one of these things to like get workers reskilled in cybersecurity. So with that program, basically it paid for classes at my local community college, which it has an excellent cyber program and also paid for like certifications. So the idea is that you would take a class, sit for a cert, take a class, sit for a cert. So those two things are really what made it possible for me to just kind of throw caution to the wind and leap into this with like both feet. There's so many different roles in cybersecurity. So, you know, everybody thinks like, to be in cyber is to be like a pen tester or something, right? But there's many, many different paths that people can take. I always recommend, you know, trying to find your specialty, your, like one thing that you're really good at and focus on that, and it doesn't mean you can't build other skills along the way. But to have something that you're really good at is confidence boosting, for sure. And it gives you, you know, sort of a starting point. I love the part where I feel like a detective, basically. So trying to get to the bottom of maybe a cyber campaign or trying to understand motivations of a threat actor or, you know, whatever, it's just a lot of uncovering of stones. And in my role as a security researcher, like, it's the perfect job for me because I get to work and as I always say, whatever shiny cyber thing catches my eye, as long as it's impactful potentially to our clients. And then my other role at SecureWorks is the emerging threats lead. So that also suits me very nicely because I do like to try to keep my finger on the pulse of anything sort of new and interesting that's coming down the pike. So I look at cyber crime, I look at different countries and their cyber activity outside of, like, the primary ones that we already have, you know, people. Like, we have a Russian person and a North Korean person and, you know, so on and so forth. But I get, like, what we call the rest of the world. I'm certainly of a generation of women that were not encouraged to do anything particularly technical, and I didn't know anybody who did anything particularly technical. I think I had, like, one friend who was maybe a civil engineer or something like that, but, you know, nobody else worked in any kind of role like that. So it really took a long time to realize that I can be a technical person, and I'm actually pretty good at it. And to me, there's nothing like, more exciting than getting somebody to be passionate about cybersecurity as an industry or just to get excited about a topic. You see light bulbs going off when people suddenly get how something works. And to me, that's super rewarding. This is a tough industry and we need more people always to help solve all the hard problems there are, help defend, help do all the things in cyber. And we just don't have enough people, we don't have enough bodies. So from that end, we just need more people, period. But I also particularly like to encourage diversity in hiring and encourage women. And really anybody who is interested in the field and has, you know, comes from a diverse background to get into it, because also it's. It's a great way to, like, stimulate your mind and just keep growing as a person, because it's so, you know, not static. You. You have to continue to grow and learn, and I think that's. That's awesome for people to be able to do.