How did you get into the field? Was it luck - or was it something you aimed for?
For me it was Project Honeynet. I was working as a programmer at the time and had been working with IT a few years. I had always been interested in security and when the PH Forensic challenges opened up in the early 00s i was amazed!
I was first stumped by what to do, i couldn't even mount an image or decode packets in Wireshark, but i persevered and learned step after step. There were no SANS - or anything back then, and all you could do was the Google everything and learn as you went.
At the time i did some challenges at work, and i could tell that my boss at the time was not overly happy about that so i continued at home. Time went by, i changed jobs and eventually i found a place where my boss appreciated my knowledge and i ended up getting some airmiles to get some good training from some of the best skilled people in the world.
A new manager were hired and things went downhill as i realised that the person showed traits of narcissistic personality disorder, i was moved to a total disaster area with managers that didn't have a clue what they were doing - and people fled from that place too. For the moment I'm working on a temp project with something similar, but I'm looking to get back into the real game soon.
Looking forward to hear your stories.
For me it was a bit of both.
I used to work in a completely unrelated field, and knew I wanted to switch to something investigative. I started out as a private investigator, just working on offline cases, but it was so obvious that digital was the way forward that I started looking at training in this area as well. Also, it became evident after I'd worked on a few private investigation cases that other PIs from traditional firms often weren't even doing basic online OSINT to supplement/help their cases, which seemed like a gaping hole in the market.
And then I started working for Forensic Focus, and now I'm pretty… well, focused on forensics. 😉
For me it was strictly luck.
I joined the police force and everything just turned in a direction which I never expected. My primary role mostly focus around cellular analysis, triangulating cell sites and OSINT. From there as a natural progression, I was ushered into computer and mobile forensics, having gone through a number of training.
And that is how I ended up straddling both cellular analysis and computer and mobile forensics.