User:Kw

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Ken Williams (Born: 1966- ) is currently Director of Vulnerability Research at Computer Associates. He was formerly the founder and admin of Packet Storm Security.

While enrolled as a Computer Science / Network Security post-grad student at North Carolina State University (NCSU), in Feb 1998, Ken created a computer security web site so that he could compile and share security related data and tools. The site was hosted at NCSU. Two months later, The "Packet Storm Security" (PSS) site name was born. Ken was researching denial of service attacks one day and stumbled across an email from *@ucia.gov that mentioned "UDP packet storms". That is where the name came from. A couple months later, the NCSU Administration, bothered that SATAN, Crack, and John the Ripper could be downloaded from their student web servers, decided to pull the site offline.

So, with a big web site of security/hacking tools, papers, e-zines, crypto archive, etc, Ken had no where to go ... until Genocide and DoxAvg from Genocide2600.com offered to host PSS on their server, and RapidNet (ISP) offered bandwidth. During the next year, Ken quickly grew PSS into the most popular security site in the world. The daily support from Genocide, DoxAvg, Conjuror, and the rest of the Genocide2600 group was instrumental to the success of PSS.

The site prospered for about a year .... until July 1999 when the site became so popular that it outgrew RapidNet. In desperate need of additional bandwidth and storage space, Ken accepted an offer from Harvard University to host PSS. Ken had received well over 200 offers, but only Harvard provided a straight feed to multiple OC48s, Internet2, and Abilene.

Nine days after Ken settled in at Harvard, John Vranesevich (JP) of Antionline.com fabricated a story about illegal activities being perpetrated by Ken through the PSS web site, and was able to get PSS shut down by Harvard University. JP claimed that Ken had harassed him, threatened his sister, and encouraged others to hunt down JP and kill him. While none of this was true, it was enough for the Harvard legal team to make a kneejerk decision to boot PSS off their network.

PSS sat offline for a few weeks, with no inexpensive options for a 5 GB site that had been turning 500 GB/mo (in 1999). In a bid to get PSS back online, Ken sold the site to Securify (division of Kroll-O'Gara). PSS was quickly brought back online by Securify. The day after selling PSS, Ken accepted a job at Ernst & Young to "build a world class security portal".

In 2001, E&Y spun off Ken's practice to form eSecurityOnline. Then, in 2004, Computer Associates acquired eSecurityOnline, and Ken followed.

Ken Williams and his wife currently live somewhere in the midwest with their eight cats. Ken currently serves on the CVE Editorial Board.

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