Attackers will take any excuse to expose a user’s vulnerabilities — even during a pandemic. 

It’s a scary thought, but James Green, a senior director of software engineering at cybersecurity solutions company Rapid7, is no stranger to dealing with hackers. 

“What’s amazing is there are bad folks who will use any opportunity that they have to take advantage of people,” Green said. “There’s a lot of coronavirus maps being used to actually deploy malware. The impact of what we do is huge in this digital world.”

Founded nearly 20 years ago, Rapid7 has ballooned from a small startup in Boston to a global company with offices on three continents. According to Chief Innovation Officer Lee Weiner, Rapid7’s solutions rely on gathering a large amount of data to help prevent attacks from ever happening.

“Our challenge is to help customers operate and innovate securely while not being slowed down,” Weiner said. “The focus of the team in Los Angeles is to build a product that helps prevent breaches, thus helping companies protect themselves and their customers.”

In mid-March, Built In LA spoke with three members of Rapid7’s engineering team to discuss how the tech they’re building keeps their customers protected, and how they stay up to date in an ever-changing world. 

Tell us a little more about Rapid7’s security products. How are they effective in discovering vulnerabilities? 

Shraya Ramani, Senior Software Engineer: We have a variety of products that encompass our security solutions for customers. Some of these include user behavior analytics products and a vulnerability measure product that we work on in the LA office. And we also have penetration testing services. Our InsightVM tool scans for vulnerabilities in our customers’ networks, which could be on an employee’s laptop or the server, and then when we find these vulnerabilities, we provide solutions to be able to fix them and hopefully prevent them from known attacks by the bad guys.

Vikram Jiandani, Lead Software Engineer: In general, we ask our customers to install a program in their system that will go through and look at all the different computers and servers that are in their system and collect a bunch of data that we’ll analyze to see if they have any vulnerabilities. We have a few different approaches to do this. One is you install the software in their network. The other approach is you install something on a specific device and it will collect information about that device. We have other solutions as well, including for the cloud. We’ll ask questions like, “Is an Amazon Web Services account configured securely?” or “Does our customer have a bucket that anyone can download stuff from?”

What sets Rapid7 apart from other cybersecurity companies? 

Green: We definitely focus on common problems — that’s always been at the core of Rapid7’s DNA. While other cybersecurity companies have focused on top-tier enterprise companies, we’ve always focused on the broader market, trying to democratize security and bring it to the masses. Our approach also lets us get those very large enterprise customers, but our focus is always more on the common problems rather than those 1 percent of problems that only a very large organization has.

Rapid7 prides itself on being customer-centric. What does that mean in a cybersecurity setting? 

Green: A lot of enterprise products aren’t easy to use — they’re not intuitive and they don’t have a great user experience. I think that’s one of the things that has really helped us. We’ve always had that heavy focus on UX and ask if the customer is getting value from the product. The challenge of security is not just having the capability of gathering the data and detecting the attack, but sifting through the noise and making security simplified.

Ramani: We make sure to dedicate at least one day a week to fixing customer issues that may come up from support. The product and UX teams spend a lot of time interviewing customers and are really good at relaying that feedback to the engineers. This makes it easy to figure out ways to make the product experience better for our customers. We also take into account customer feedback edge cases that are related to user experience. 

How is working in cybersecurity different from other engineering jobs?  

Jiandani: It’s a very high-paced environment where you have to constantly keep an eye out for how people are changing their attack approaches, as well as how our customers are changing their business methodology. So when a new technology comes out, like Docker containers, we need to be able to adapt to those types of new changes. 

Green: We have people with different areas of focus. Some deal with the analysis and aggregation of large sets of data. Others are dealing with very specific ways of targeting or detecting attacks. We have our own white hat hackers in the company that figure out what the bad folks can do before they do it. When people are focused on a specific domain, they don’t have to worry about everything — they can go really deep in the area of their expertise.