The son of internationally known cybersecurity expert Juanita Koilpillai has been charged with the killing of his mother.
Authorities have arrested Andrew Beavers, 23, on suspicion of first- and second-degree murder, Anne Arundel County police said.
Sri Lankan-born Koilpillai had been reported missing by her boyfriend on July 25 after he found blood in her waterfront home in Tracys Landing. Following a search, police found her body hidden outside her car in Leesburg, Virginia, where Beavers’s father lives and where Koilpillai had another residence.
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An autopsy the following day showed that she had died as a result of multiple sharp force injuries. The police said the killing had been planned and was not a random attack.
During the investigation into her death, authorities spoke to friends, family, and coworkers. Detectives suspected Beavers after they noticed he had a fresh cut on his right hand that he could not explain, they said.
The medical examiner said both Beavers’s and Koilpillai’s DNA had been found on a knife.
Koilpillai had worked with the federal government to create impenetrable defenses against hackers and ransomware. The programmer’s death pierced the cybersecurity world, and her death has been a blow to national security due to her knowledge in understanding how to make virtual work environments safe, the Washington Post reported. Koilpillai was one of the few female executives in the field who willingly shared her knowledge and mentored the next generation of cybersecurity experts.
“I’ll say (she was) a certifiable genius,” Ron Martin, a close friend and professor at Capitol Technology University, told the Capital Gazette.
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Jim Reavis, co-founder of the Cloud Security Alliance, called Koilpillai “an anomaly” as a female leader of a cybersecurity company.
“She was one of the few that was sort of inventing the security management technology space,” he told the Washington Post.
Koilpillai was also a consultant for the Securities and Exchange Commission.
