Jake Williams

aka MalwareJake

Jake has spent decades in security doing the things most people only put on slides. Former NSA-designated Master Network Exploitation Operator, intelligence-community and military veteran, former startup founder, and former senior SANS instructor who wrote the courses other people teach — he's been on both sides of the keyboard, and he has the scar tissue to prove it.

He's twice won the DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) Digital Forensics Challenge, which is a fancy way of saying he's very good at figuring out exactly how you got owned. Today he's an IANS faculty member and independent consultant, spending his time where AI and machine learning collide with security — the corner of the industry currently generating the most hype per gigabyte.

You've probably caught him at Black Hat, DEF CON, ShmooCon, or RSA — or arguing with someone on the internet about incident response. His specialties: IR, digital forensics, threat modeling, penetration testing, and telling you the uncomfortable thing you needed to hear about your security architecture.

On Breach Please, Jake brings the offensive-and-defensive perspective, the receipts, and a very low tolerance for marketing that pretends a dashboard is a strategy.