November 2011

On forensic science many resources are available on the internet, one resource that I saw lately, is a good overview for people that are interested in a carreer in forensic science, http://www.bestforensicscienceschools.com/blog/ or http://www.forensicsciencetechnician.net/blog/ . The specialized universities that have course in forensic science, are numerous. One issue is however that there are many more students in forensic science, compared to the number of jobs available in the field. So often I have students that work on a project for a while, and then later on, of course they will do some other work, related to forensic science, or perhaps something completely different.

This is different for students that specialize in forensic ICT, and currently it is difficult to attract people to these jobs since not many students appear to chose ICT. Also the number of people that are requested in cybersecurity related areas are very many. We see that law enforcement in many countries is expanding in many countries, since we become aware that since many processes are linked to internet, with software and hardware that are mostly not very transparant in how they exactly work. Also we see that systems are updated regularly, due to the complexity of the software and hardware solutions, this remains also a challenge even if the source code is available. Reverse engineering is often work that takes a lot of patience and time, and with the development cycles of products become shorter, it means also that with new versions of software and hardware, only a part can be used again.

Malware developers are also changing there software often, and it is unknown how many systems have been infected, however the number of reports of botnets are huge and develop malware. So either way, there is a lot in forensic ICT to develop, investigate and finally learn from these in making systems more secure.