About

About Me

Hi, I’m Carson

Feel free to reach out!
[email protected]

(331) 643-9120[email protected]linkedin.com/in/carsonwestwilliams

Education

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN — May 2024
Major: Cybersecurity  GPA: 3.68

  • Purdue Presidential Scholarship
  • Dean’s List

Work Experience

ReliaQuest — Cybersecurity Specialist

June 2024 – Present

  • Serve as designated technical point of contact for two accounts, driving resolution of security issues across incident response and engineering through continuous collaboration and support.
  • Provide targeted security recommendations based on alert patterns, detection trends, and visibility gaps, ensuring customers align with industry best practices and improving security posture.
  • Independently integrate and configure log sources, resolving data ingestion and parsing issues across customer environments.
  • Mentor and train new analysts and interns by guiding investigations, sharing best practices, and providing hands-on support with tooling and workflows.
  • Leverage leading endpoint detection and response (EDR) and security information and event management (SIEM) platforms to investigate threats, correlate events, and support incident response.
  • Automate threat intelligence workflows by leveraging open source intelligence (OSINT) platforms VirusTotal and URLScan to monitor ClickFix and Lumma C2 activity, enabling rapid detection and response.
  • Proactively analyze detection trends to identify tuning opportunities, refining rules to reduce false positives and improve alert fidelity.

Ingredion — Global IT Security Intern

May 2023 – August 2023

  • Tracked and monitored security events using Carbon Black EDR and Rapid7 SIEM functionalities to identify potential threats, mitigate risks, and enhance system security.
  • Utilized APIs and PowerShell Active Directory enumeration to collect data from over 10,000 endpoints from multiple sources into a centralized repository.
  • Developed a PowerShell script using Carbon Black’s API for the automated removal of false positives from the Carbon Black console, enhancing threat detection accuracy and operational efficiency.

Purdue University — Residential Networks Support Representative

August 2022 – May 2024

  • Resolved residential network issues on campus to provide stability for over 15,000 students.
  • Pinpointed connectivity issues, optimized network performance, and ensured seamless internet access for students.

Initiatives

Virtualized Windows Security Lab — Personal Project

August 2023 – Present

  • Design and develop a home lab environment using Proxmox and DevOps tools to virtualize a vulnerable Windows domain.
  • Utilize OPNsense to isolate network segments and control the flow of traffic between zones.
  • Integrate network and endpoint log sources into Splunk to drive visibility, detection rule development, and threat modeling within the lab environment.

Skills

Languages: Python, PowerShell, Batch, Bash
SIEM: Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, QRadar, Google SecOps, Exabeam, CrowdStrike Next-Gen SIEM
EDR: CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender, Carbon Black