Dr. Bramwell Brizendine with his students, (L-R), Micah Flack, Bramwell Brizendine, Shiva Shashank Kusuma and Sriabhinay Kusuma.
Courtesy Bramwell Brizendine
Dr. Bramwell Brizendine, an assistant professor of computer science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, has been selected to receive the Young Faculty Award (YFA), an award of $500,000, from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The funding will support the researcher’s work on Binary Emulation and Analysis Simulation Technology (BEAST), a cutting-edge system that aims to create a more powerful framework for emulating and analyzing malware behavior, providing deeper insight into how malicious code evolves and spreads, including malicious functionality that ordinarily would not be reachable.
“Many modern malware programs are built to detect when someone is trying to study them and then hide or behave differently,” Brizendine explains. “That forces malware analysts to spend many long hours manually trying to analyze the malware, which slows down detection and response. BEAST will be able to unlock or unravel secrets of malware that cannot be currently obtained.”
Brizendine is the first faculty member at UAH, a part of The University of Alabama System, to earn this distinction. In 2025, only 26 recipients were chosen nationwide, most from elite research universities. The project is a collaboration with Dr. Kyle Murbach and Jared Sheldon from the UAH Center for Cybersecurity Research and Education (CCRE).
Many types of malware are designed with anti-debugging or anti-analysis techniques that detect when they’re being tested in a secure environment, Brizendine reports. When this happens, the malware may display decoy behavior or completely hide its malicious functions. Anti-debugging techniques can make it challenging to analyze malware as it runs, particularly when using automated methods.
“The research selected for DARPA YFA is intended to be potentially transformational and high impact,” Brizendine says, emphasizing that malware is a big threat, especially in medical settings where lives can be at risk. Hundreds of hospitals have been the target of malware attacks in recent years, including in Germany, where a patient was prevented from receiving care after a ransomware attack at a hospital.
“It is even happening in Alabama,” the UAH researcher points out. “There was an incident in 2019 where three hospitals had to temporarily close due to ransomware.”
Colleges and universities can also be subject to ransomware attacks, according to the honoree. “There was even an incident of one university having to permanently shut down due to a series of cascading failures that stemmed from a ransomware attack they could never recover from.”
As noted on the DARPA website, “The YFA program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior research positions in academia and equivalent positions at non-profit research institutions, particularly those without prior DARPA funding, to expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) needs and DARPA’s mission to create and prevent technological surprise for national security.” Brizendine was the only recipient from Alabama.
Malware has become a matter of national security, as some attacks employ a type of malware known as “wipers,” designed to destroy data rather than demand a ransom. With this kind of malware, the goal is to erase information on a computing device in a way that makes recovery extremely difficult or even impossible.
“With BEAST we would be able to gain threat intelligence on the sample in question much more quickly, in an automated fashion, without requiring human analysis, Brizendine concludes. “This could allow hospitals or schools that would otherwise be victimized by malware to use the threat intelligence provided by BEAST to take proactive preventative measures and avoid infection. Put simply, BEAST helps us quickly and automatically understand dangerous malware that tricks or hides from analysis, so hospitals, schools and other organizations can act before they get hit.”
The BEAST project will be supported by three UAH computer science students as well: Alexander Wood, Luke Bower, and William Lochte.