Max leverages more than 10 years of experience in Digital Forensics and Incident Response to drive Kroll Cyber Response’s growth and enable leading organizations to address ransomware, email compromises, insider threats, zero-day vulnerabilities, and other security threats.
Prior to joining Kroll, Max was the founding leader of the Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) program at Pondurance during his 11-year tenure. Under his leadership, the Pondurance DFIR program was recognized as a finalist at the Zywave Awards for Global Incident Response Team of the Year annually from 2022 to 2025 and as a finalist for Global Incident Response Team of the Year by the Intelligent Insurer in 2025.
Prior to creating the Pondurance DFIR program, Max established the Threat Hunting team within Pondurance’s Managed Detection & Response service and was routinely involved in proactive services including tabletop exercises, compromise assessments, penetration tests, security incident response plan development and more.
To date, Max has directly led over 1,000 incident response cases. Max’s casework has commonly been featured on news headlines, including a healthcare matter featured on CBS 60 Minutes’ “Ransomware”. Max has also served as an expert witness for the Fortune100 and has served as a multi-time expert contributor to CNN on cybersecurity.
Max is a frequent global speaker on cybersecurity, including multiple guest appearances at Yale University and a multi-time lead moderator for the Ransomware Advisory Group at NetDiligence. Max has previously been the headline speaker nationally to all members for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) InfraGard organization and has presented alongside the National Crime Agency (NCA) in London and the United States Secret Services at various venues including Citi Field in New York. Additionally, Max was selected as the closing keynote speaker at LMCU Ballpark for CloudCon in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Max earned Advisory Board status at GIAC for his outstanding examination score on the GIAC Reverse Engineering Malware (GREM) certification in 2019. Max holds a Bachelor of Science in computer criminology from Florida State University.
