Jim Jones

James "Jim" Jones has been a cyber security and digital forensics practitioner, researcher, and educator for over 30 years in industry, government, and academia. That experience drives his teaching, which blends theory and practical applications, and his research, which focuses on the extraction, analysis, and manipulation of full and partial digital artifacts. Jim and his students spend their days (and nights) collecting and analyzing these digital clues and fragments, much like a traditional archaeologist works with old pieces of pottery or a detective works with crime scene evidence. This analysis helps them look backward in time to understand cyber attacks, find malware infections, detect system and device misuse, and recover lost data.

Jim's research funding comes from industry and the US Government. Past and current funded research sponsors include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the United States Department of Defense (DoD). He has degrees in Systems Engineering (BS), Mathematical Sciences (MS), and Computational Sciences and Informatics (PhD). This formal education is complemented by work experience and extensive self-learning, driven by an insatiable curiosity and a need to know how things work, how they break, and what we can learn from both.

Research

2018 - 2020: Digital Media Sector Hashing for Evidence Correlation. Funded by the DHS CINA center.

2018 - 2020: Cyber P3 Scholarship Program. Funded by NSA/P3.

2018 - 2019: Software Penetration Testing. Funded by Progeny Systems.

2018 - 2019: Scientific Advances to Continuous Insider Threat Evaluation (SCITE). Funded by IARPA.

2018: Network Topology Discovery. Funded by Progeny Systems.

2018: Distributed System Pattern Discovery Using Time Series Discords. Funded by Vectare Engineering.

2017-2027: DHS Center of Excellence for Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis (CINA). Funded by DHS.

2017: Information Assurance Research for Wireless Mediums. Funded by Vectare Engineering.

2016-2017: Cyber-Physical Security Labs for USAR Cyber Soldier Development. Funded by NSA/P3.

2016-2017: Inferring Past Mobile Device Activity from Partial Digital Artifacts. Funded by Naval Postgraduate School.

2016: Persistence and Extraction of Digital Artifacts from Embedded Systems. Funded by the University of Maryland.

2013 - 2016: Reasoning for Digital Artifact Association, Attribution, and Integrity. Funded by Naval Postgraduate School.

Research Interests

Computer and Network Security, Digital Forensics

Degrees

• PhD, Computational Sciences and Informatics, George Mason University
• MS, Mathematical Sciences, Clemson University
• BA, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Tech