Meet Bahirah, Award-Winning Engineer & DEI Advocate

Having grown up on a steady diet of Dragon Ball Z cartoons and Die Hard movies, Bahirah Adewunmi isn’t surprised at all to be working in cyber—a profession where outsmarting the bad guys is always the ultimate goal. She’s also a huge fan of Mortal Kombat and Muay Thai kickboxing. “It’s not a leap that I’d end up in a career where my literal job is to come up with ways to completely pwn my adversaries,” she says.

Like the heroes she roots for on TV, Bahirah is a person of action. As a founding member of Booz Allen’s Black Analytics Group, she’s organizing a number of efforts within the company to recruit, develop talent, and seed research at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU). “If you talk to people who work on similar engagements with HBCUs through Booz Allen, you’ll find they’re often personal passion projects,” she says. “The initiatives we’re rolling out through the Black Analytics Group are our way to formalize and consolidate those types of efforts.”

Bahirah credits her leading role in the Black Analytics Group as one reason that she was recently honored with a Black Engineer of the Year Award from US Black Engineer & Information Technology Magazine. Another reason is the envelope-pushing work she’s doing at Booz Allen’s DarkLabs, where she helps Department of Defense clients integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and other cutting-edge technologies into their offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.

We recently talked to Bahirah about her award-winning work and how Hollywood’s version of cyber differs from the real thing. Read on for more of our conversation.

How did it feel to be one of 2022’s Black Engineer of the Year Award winners?

Humbling. Embarrassing because I’m 64% introverted. Also validating, and encouraging. I’m not surrounded by a lot of people who look like me, so it’s always great to see people who do look like me accomplishing great things.

Tell us more about the Black Analytics Group. What inspired you to be one of its founders?

The Black Analytics Group is led by scientists, engineers, and consultants of color at Booz Allen who are dedicated to advancing equity and inclusion within the firm and more broadly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. We’re focused on recruiting, engagement, and retention, and on providing more rewarding opportunities to groups underrepresented in STEM by facilitating research partnerships with HBCUs focused on addressing the grand challenges of today through data science, AI, cybersecurity, quantum, high-performance computing, and federated learning.

The Group came together in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. It grew out of the many discussions we were having within the firm at the time, especially among people of color and Booz Allen leadership.

What’s the simplest way of describing the complex cyber work you do at Booz Allen?

Put broadly, my job is to help make the nation’s cyber warfare capabilities more effective and more dependable, and I do that through research and development in the realm of offensive and adversarial cyber.

How does your work help prepare your clients for the future?

When you’re working with government there’s always an aspect of being in competition with other nations, and an impetus to always be improving and providing the best.

So as a data scientist and software engineer and technical lead, I have a mandate to help my clients stay at the cutting edge—to help them move forward when it’s time, rather than patching up what they’re comfortable with already.

How does real-life cyber differ from what you see in the movies?

In one of the Die Hard movies you see the villains take over an entire city in one sitting. In reality, I don’t care if you’re sitting there for 24 hours, there’s no way you’re going to be able to penetrate that fast. In real-life hacking there’s a lot of time spent gathering reconnaissance and even after network penetration there are additional steps like moving laterally across the network and finding stealthy ways to escalate privileges. There’s no instant gratification. It would be very boring to watch over someone’s shoulder.

What’s something you’ve accomplished in your work with a client that really makes you proud?

I once converted hundreds of pages of unformatted information into a relational database that functioned to increase the fidelity of a cyber training exercise we were running with a client. Usually a developer working on something like that would save time by downloading common code routines from an online module repository, but I was working in an extremely high security environment, so all systems were air-gapped, which means no internet access among other restrictions. I developed over 1000 lines of code to get the job done. When I was away from the computer after work, I was literally using pen and paper to write out code chunks I wanted to try the next day!

Any security advice you’d like to share with the people reading this?

Hide your ports, hide your network identifiers, and hide your passwords because there are hackers out there watching everything.