Our third episode, “Cyber Breach Response”, features guest speakers Angeline Chen and Bodo Meseke.  I asked our guests if “a student or someone more junior would like to do what you do or get into your area, what advice would you give them?”  Bodo said:

“We have some lawyers already that have technical knowledge.  But the other way around, it is much more complicated to find deep dive technical people that also have an understanding of the legal aspects related to their work, or related to an accident that they don’t just act in a technical way and do not respect what are the legal constraints or whatever.  So if you really want to get really deep into this business, if you want to get in the area that I’m representing today, you really need to ramp up technical skills because digital forensics and deep understanding of what is going on in cyber tech is far beyond user level IT knowledge.  You need to know what is a registry in Windows, how does it work?  What do I find there?  How is the file system working?  How can the files be hidden into this file system?  How is my web working?  Do I need to reverse engineer, software code, or whatever?  So you really need to do a deep dive into the technical part.  This can be done, and it’s not too difficult if you have quite good technical understanding and technical interest, but it needs some time to come there, to have this really deep understanding that you can bring all the aspects together that you need for a cyber investigation from a technical perspective.  But you can look for dedicated studies, trainings, join a team maybe on a basis of participation for some months or whatever, and find out if this is the right way for you.  I would very much appreciate it because, as I said, meanwhile, there are very, very good lawyers with good technical understanding, but we are still lacking very, very good technical people with the right legal understanding. ”

Interested in hearing more?  Check out Episode 3 here (available August 31, 2021).