Brent Cook
Security Engineer at Fencer
Pflugerville, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrent Cook is a security engineer with 15 years of hands-on experience building and hardening offensive security tooling, having led vulnerability management and offensive engineering teams at Rapid7 and served as a software security manager at Amazon. He combines deep systems and back-end expertise—demonstrated by substantive contributions to Metasploit (framework, payloads, mettle) and LibreSSL portable—with DevOps chops in packaging and automating complex builds across platforms. Brent has a track record of fixing real-world CVEs, improving payload and network handling, and making crypto and TLS code portable and performant across OSes. He moves fluidly between individual contributor work (native Meterpreter features, build optimizations) and senior leadership roles that scale security content and teams. Based in Pflugerville, TX, he’s also an OpenBSD/LibreSSL contributor and, less obviously, a zucchini grower—bringing practical curiosity and patience to long-term engineering challenges.
15 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin
Github Skills (60)
docker10
tls1210
scripting10
wp-api10
patch10
it-security10
packaging10
linux10
build-system10
bash10
c1110
winapi10
makefile10
networking10
dockers10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
libressl/portable
Jul 2014 - Jan 2023
LibreSSL Portable itself. This includes the build scaffold and compatibility layer that builds portable LibreSSL from the OpenBSD source code. Pull requests or patches sent to tech@openbsd.org are welcome.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:14 releases, 22 reviews, 1100 commits in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Brent primarily contributed to the core functionality and security of the LibreSSL project. Their work involved implementing compatibility shims, adding system-specific implementations (e.g., for AIX and Windows), integrating build optimizations for x86_64, adding support for ciphers (e.g., Camellia and SM4), updating various manpages, and resolving build and platform-specific issues. They were also responsible for refactoring existing components and ensuring portability across different operating systems.
scaffoldlibresslbuildscompatibility-layerbsd
rapid7/mettle
Jan 2015 - Dec 2020
This is an implementation of a native-code Meterpreter, designed for portability, embeddability, and low resource utilization.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 400 commits, 131 PRs in 6 years
Contributions summary:Brent implemented key network and command processing features within the native Meterpreter implementation. This included the implementation of network URI parsing and host selection, as well as the addition of buffer queue functionality to improve the handling of data in transit and reception. The changes also include the integration of the TLV (Type/Length/Value) parser and handler to connect it to network client and handlers, and provide logging features.
native-codeutilizationrustmeterpreterlow-resource
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