William Stearns
CSO at WLS Industries
Lebanon, New Hampshire, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Stearns is a seasoned security executive and practitioner with 11+ years of formal experience and a career in security and systems roles stretching back to the 1990s. As CSO of WLS Industries and a former Director of Security at Dyn, he blends leadership with hands-on technical chops in network forensics, incident response, and DevOps. He contributed to the RITA project (Real Intelligence Threat Analytics), improving Zeek/Bro integration, JA3/SSL logging, and cross-platform installation—reflecting a focus on practical tooling for detecting command-and-control activity. William co-founded SURBL and has long been involved in anti-abuse and email-reputation ecosystems, bringing deep operational knowledge of blacklist maintenance and spam mitigation. He has taught and advised through SANS and Dartmouth research roles, pairing academic rigor with field-tested defenses. Based in New Hampshire with a BA in Mathematics from the University of Vermont, he is a pragmatic security leader who prefers building durable detection and automation over flashy one-offs.
10 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Mathematics, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Mathematics at University of Vermont
Github Skills (15)
sh10
network-traffic10
script10
shell10
devops10
scripting10
network-analysis10
traffic-analysis10
install-script9
security9
bash9
automations8
automation8
dockers5
docker5
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
activecm/rita-legacy
Feb 2019 - Jul 2021
Real Intelligence Threat Analytics (RITA) is a framework for detecting command and control communication through network traffic analysis.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 10 commits, 16 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the installation and configuration of RITA within the Bro/Zeek environment. They added functionality to the installation script to install JA3 and enable SSL certificate logging. The user also made improvements to the RITA installation process, including adding command-line options, supporting different operating systems, and extending the Zeek inactivity timeout.
traffic-analysistrafficbeacon-sniffercommand-and-controlthreat-intelligence
activecm/passer
Nov 2018 - Jun 2022
Passive service locator, a python sniffer that identifies servers, clients, names and much more
Contributions:3 reviews, 48 commits, 34 PRs in 3 years 7 months
netmikopacketspythonlocatorservice-locator
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