Brendan Watters - Staff Researcher at Rapid7

Brendan Watters

Staff Researcher at Rapid7

Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Brendan Watters is a Staff Researcher and seasoned cybersecurity engineer with over a decade of experience building and hardening offensive and defensive tooling at Rapid7 and in government. He combines deep systems and exploit development expertise—evidenced by contributions to flagship Metasploit projects like meterpreter/mettle and fixes for reverse TCP payloads—with applied research leadership and patent-aware innovation. Brendan’s background spans kernel and userland programming, forensic and network analysis, and developer training, reflecting a rare blend of hands-on code, teaching, and operational tradecraft. Based in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, he has a strong academic foundation (M.S. Computer Science, M.A. in History & Philosophy of Science and Technology) that informs pragmatic, well-documented security solutions. Not obviously apparent from titles alone, he’s contributed nuanced portability and compatibility improvements (UTF-8 registry support, UUID generation, Python3 Windows fixes) to widely used open-source offensive frameworks.

10 years of coding experience

Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science, Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science at Florida State University

Master of Arts (M.A.) History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Master of Arts (M.A.) History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at University of Florida

English

Github Skills (23)

wp-api10

process-management10

c-programming10

winapi10

c1110

security10

c1710

ruby10

system-calls10

payload10

ws-api10

reverse-engineering10

metasploit10

file-manipulation9

filesystem9

Programming languages (7)

PowerShellC++CGoHTMLRubyPython

Github contributions (5)

rapid7/mettle

Apr 2016 - Aug 2022

This is an implementation of a native-code Meterpreter, designed for portability, embeddability, and low resource utilization.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:22 commits, 16 PRs, 17 pushes in 6 years 5 months

Contributions summary:Brendan implemented and refined several system calls for the `mettle` project, a native-code Meterpreter. Their work focused on adding functionality for process management, including getting process lists, attaching to processes, killing processes, getting process information, and retrieving the current meterpreter PID. These changes involved modifying existing code and integrating with the Sigar library for process-related data retrieval and management. The user also addressed a bug related to how the `tlv_packet_get_u32` function was getting the wrong sized value, further highlighting the user's contributions in improving the underlying framework.

native-code

rapid7/metasploit-framework

Mar 2016 - Jan 2023

Metasploit Framework

Role in this project:

Backend Developer

Contributions:645 reviews, 966 commits, 608 PRs in 6 years 11 months

Contributions summary:Brendan's commits focus on rubocop fixes and on fixing the reverse TCP payload. These changes indicate an interest in improving code quality through formatting and cleanup as well as fixing a critical component of an exploit. Further work includes adding new features.

metasploit

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