The Story of ForAllSecure: From High School Dropout to Cybersecurity Innovation

The Story of ForAllSecure: From High School Dropout to Cybersecurity Innovation

A crystal meth dealer’s arrest doesn’t typically launch a cybersecurity company. But for ForAllSecure founder David Brumley, it was the wake-up call that set him on an unlikely path to revolutionizing computer security. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, David shared the remarkable journey from high school dropout to cybersecurity pioneer.

An Unconventional Beginning

“I was actually a high school dropout, and at some point in my life I was working as a cook and I ended up living with actually a crystal meth dealer,” David recalls. “Police came in, arrested him one night, decided my life wasn’t where I wanted to be.”

This pivotal moment led him back to school and eventually to Stanford University, where his fascination with cybersecurity took root. “What really got me interested in this field was this idea that attackers could bend computers to their will. I found it really freeing, actually, to think that I wasn’t constrained by that.”

The Stanford Awakening

As Stanford’s CISO around 2000, David encountered a stark reality of cybersecurity when discovering a compromised physicist’s computer. “A hacker had found a brand new zero day and then they had used that to compromise everything at Stanford to break into all the systems,” he explains. This included having to “turn off Google Stanford.edu when it was hacked in, like, 1999.”

These early experiences in Silicon Valley shaped his perspective on the industry. “At that time, it felt like all the best work was happening in universities and startup scene was just starting out,” David notes. “I remember actually being approached by Google at one point asking, are you interested in being a computer security guy for us? And I was like, how are you going to make money? You’re like selling classified ads?”

From Academic Controversy to DARPA Victory

The genesis of ForAllSecure came from a fundamental question: “Why can’t we beat attackers? I mean, defense should have all the advantages. They have code, they have people, they have resources.” This led to groundbreaking research in 2010 that proposed teaching computers to find zero-day exploits automatically.

The idea was initially met with skepticism. “We got made fun of by a lot of people in industry at that time,” David remembers. But vindication came through DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, a $60 million initiative to develop autonomous security systems. ForAllSecure’s victory not only validated their approach but provided $2 million in seed funding.

Finding Their True Market

Early interest came heavily from defense and offensive security organizations, but ForAllSecure made a crucial strategic decision. “We’re not really interested in becoming an offense company,” David explains. “We wanted to protect computers to make them safer.”

This led them to focus on companies where security directly impacts business operations. Their approach particularly resonated with technology-first companies like Cloudflare and Roblox, where security breaches directly impact revenue. As David notes, “If someone takes down a Cloudflare node, they’re not making money.”

The Vision for Autonomous Security

Looking ahead, ForAllSecure is pursuing a bold vision of truly autonomous security systems. “What really changed, why we’re different and why DARPA had this challenge was we designed our approach so that the whole system could be autonomous,” David explains.

Their system aims to find bugs, propose patches, test them for security and performance impacts, and deploy them – all within 30 seconds, compared to the hours, days, or even years typical in traditional security approaches.

“The vision for the Company is that we want to automatically check and protect the world’s software from exploitable bugs,” David shares. It’s an ambitious goal, but one that builds on their proven ability to challenge conventional wisdom and deliver technical innovation.

From a high school dropout to pioneering autonomous cybersecurity, ForAllSecure’s story demonstrates how unconventional paths and technical courage can reshape an industry. Their journey suggests that sometimes the most transformative innovations come from questioning fundamental assumptions about how things “should” work.