Allie Mellen is a Forrester analyst covering security operations, nation-state threats and the use of automation, machine learning and AI in security tools. She is a computer engineer by trade and has held various engineering roles in her career, including doing research at MIT, running her own engineering consultancy and being a hacker before finally becoming a security practitioner. She now advises Fortune 500 CISOs and security teams on their detection and response practice and frequently speaks at industry-leading events and with the press. Allie is a featured speaker at many leading security conferences, including RSA, Black Hat, HOPE and many others. She is frequently quoted in top business press outlets including NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, CNBC and Dark Reading. Prior to joining Forrester, Allie spent her career in various engineering, research and technical consulting roles at MIT and several venture-backed startups. In addition to running her own engineering and development consultancy, she was also a security practitioner, doing hardware security research and working with product and infrastructure security teams. Allie holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Boston University.