Rebecca Bace

In the late 1980s and early 90s Bace ran the NSA's Computer Misuse and Anomaly Detection programme. It funded the universities and labs that built the first intrusion detection systems, in a field whose theoretical groundwork Dorothy Denning had laid in 1987. Bace kept the research community together through workshops at a time when the subject had neither conferences nor commercial products.

After the NSA she worked at Los Alamos and in 2000 published Intrusion Detection, one of the first textbooks on the topic. She spent the rest of her career vetting security start-ups for venture capital firms, in an industry where the datasheets seldom matched the products. Widely known as the "den mother" of computer security, she died in 2017.