Profile
Jake Williams (aka MalwareJake) is a seasoned security researcher with decades of experience in technology and security. Jake is a former startup founder, former senior SANS instructor and course author, and an intelligence community and military veteran. He loves forensics, incident response, cyber threat intelligence and offensive methodologies. Today, Jake is an IANS faculty member, an independent security consultant, and is performing security-focused research to benefit the broader community. He has had the honor of twice winning the DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) annual digital forensics challenge. You may also know Jake from one of his many conference talks, webcasts, media appearances or his postings about cybersecurity.
Expertise
- Incident Response
- Digital Forensics
- Threat Modeling
- Penetration Testing
- Security Architecture
Qualifications
Achievements & Contributions
- Two-Time Winner of the Annual DC3 Forensics Challenge
- Speaker at information security conferences such as Black Hat, DEF CON, ShmooCon, RSA, and DC3
- Designated a Master Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) Operator by the NSA
- Former Vulnerability Analyst at US Department of Defense
- Former Senior Systems Engineer at Dell Services
Certifications & Credentials
- MSIA, Information Assurance –Capitol College
- GSE, GSNA, GCFE, GREM, GCWN, GCIA, GCIH, GPEN, GCFA, GXPN, GSEC –GIAC
Upcoming Events
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March 04 2025
2025 March Webinar: Security Implications of Chinese-Developed LLMs
In late January, the Chinese start-up company DeepSeek introduced an open-source large language model (LLM) that led to billion-dollar impacts on the stock market and myriad questions around the future of LLM development and use. In this webinar, IANS Faculty Summer Fowler and Jake Williams discuss the security risks with LLMs developed by Chinese organizations. While keeping the math to a minimum, some technical background in LLMs is critical to understanding these issues. Expect to learn some about how LLMs actually work, what "open source" actually means for an LLM, and why it's impossible to fully audit a model.
March 13 2025
2025 Q1 Symposium: Ransomware Preparedness: Lessons From Real-World Incidents
According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware remains the top threat across 92% of industries, with roughly one-third of all breaches involving ransomware or some other extortion technique. In this symposium, we’ll use digital forensics and incident response reports from real-world incidents to walk through the tactics, techniques and procedures of top ransomware gangs and share lessons learned to help you avoid the same fate.