Derek Abdine

Hi! I'm Derek. I have over 20 years of experience in tech and cybersecurity. I'm self-taught technologist and leader. I started with tech in my pre-teens disassembling and reassembling computers, writing scripts for IRC chatbots, and teaching myself C, C++ and x86 assembly. By age 16, I was writing software for a gastroenterology software company. I also released a freeware peer to peer chat application. I blow off steam through video games, which are my guilty pleasure. In 2000, I played competitively, and would also build game cheats for the purpose of understanding how they work. By 2004 I started a project called game-security to replace the incumbent anti-cheat software of the time (Punk Buster). Simultaneously, disappointed that Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto did not allow multiplayer, I co-founded an open source modification called MultiTheftAuto, which used the same game cheat/anticheat techniques (code patching) to inject multiplayer code and an entire scripting engine into the game. The modification still exists today and has thousands of active online players, though I'm no longer active. Aspects that it introduced would also become the basis for the native multiplayer in Rockstar's GTA 5. I'm passionate about startups, building value fast, and learning new things. In 2005, I joined a then little-known company named Rapid7, which is now publicly traded with a multi billion dollar market cap. My time at Rapid7 spanned individual contributor and leadership roles, including security research, engineering, ops, IT, engineering management, and portfolio architecture. Before I left in 2020, I was Head of Labs, leading security researchers, data scientists, and threat hunters with a mission to help the world better navigate cybersecurity issues through open research and automation. I filed 5 patents during my time there, and led discovery of many more. In 2019, while at Rapid7, I was honored to be invited to the White House, where my team and I built out research that was incorporated into the 2019 Economic Report to the President. Today, you'll find my perspective on cybersecurity issues in news articles from outlets such as Forbes, Ars Technica, Engadget, Gizmodo, ZDNet and others. Most recently I was at Censys, Inc., as CTO, leading and building the Engineering organization, setting product vision, and leading a research team -- all to fix the problem of messy attack surfaces. My DM's are always open for business/idea inquiries or nostalgic exchanges of 90's/00's computering :)