MITRE Connects

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My name is Lex Crumpton.

I'm a lead cybersecurity engineer of security operations centers and detection engineering teams within MITRE in the Fort Meade, Maryland location.

So what drew me into cyber is I am a previous PC gamer, and one day the game broke because it was hacked.

And so that got me into how does hackings get into your system?

That spun me getting to my computer science and bachelor's, and then ultimately, getting into cybersecurity to learn how to defend against cyber attacks.

I love puzzles. And so being able to work on things that other people either can't solve, haven't been able to solve, haven't even thought about solving, I come in, I'm like, "Ooh, I got this."

I like to focus on defensive countermeasures and heuristic process or behavior analysis.

And I want to do that because when you look at a computer, and you have your normal day-to-day activity.

But when you get hacked, there's this anomaly that switches that day-to-day activity.

And I wanna find the difference between a normal day and the not normal day.

MITRE ATT&CK is an online publicly free available source that anybody can use.

And so I look at it as like a library.

It's constantly being improved and upgraded through contributions from the public, from other companies, from our customer base and from internal use of MITRE employees.

ATT&CK stakeholders are everybody in the cybersecurity community whether it's government sponsors, commercial, any of the big tech companies, everyday users.

Our stakeholders vary across the globe.

I literally say this is my dream job. And the most rewarding thing about my work and my job is being able to teach the up and coming community.

I love to give back because I wouldn't be here without the people who got me here, talk to the younger generation, teach them the things that I know and how that relates to everyday use.

And then I also mentor a lot.

I think I had 24 mentees last year.

A question I'm always asked on a daily basis, how did you improve the world?

How did you change the world or make an impact?

And with MITRE ATT&CK, we're constantly trying to push the agenda forward of defensive postures, threat-informed defense, learning about the adversaries and giving that knowledge back out to the community.

People come to us to get the information to solve these unsolvable problems.

And so being able to change the world in that aspect, I feel is how we contribute back to MITRE's mission.

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