CyberWire Daily - Encore: Marcelle Lee: Cyber sleuth detecting emerging threats. [Research] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

Senior security researcher from Secureworks Marcelle Lee shares her career journey into cybersecurity and how she helps solve hard problems in her daily work. Marcelle came into cybersecurity not through any traditional path. She describes her route from a different field and starting in cyber at her local community college through a grant program. Marcelle took full advantage of the opportunities she had and grew her career from there. She recommends finding your specialty, but continue to build other skills. As a woman in the field, she is a strong proponent of diversity and encouraging others to find what excites them. And, we thank Marcelle for sharing her story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. 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 has an excellent cyber program and also paid for like certification. 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. 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 on, 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 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 you know 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 the 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 more exciting than getting somebody to be passionate about cybersecurity as an industry or just to get excited about a topic. You see like light bulbs going off when people like suddenly, you know, get how something works. And to me, that's super rewarding. This is a tough industry, right? And we need more people always to help solve all the hard problems there are, help defend, help, you know, 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, you know, diversity in hiring and encourage women and really anybody who is interested in the field and comes from a diverse background to get into it. Because also, it's a great way to stimulate your mind and just keep growing as a person because it's so not static. You have to continue to grow and learn. And I think that's awesome for people to be able to do. Hey, everybody.

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