New Job at the NFTC!

Today was officially my first day at my new job.  I’ve taken a full-time position at Mississippi State University’s National Forensics Training Center.  The NFTC is a really great program we have in the Computer Science & Engineering department, that has a handful of primary tasks:

• Training law enforcement agents to respond to and investigate crimes involving digital evidence
• Giving wounded veterans digital forensic training, to give them a useful skill set and experience as they transition to other roles and jobs
• Providing equipment for “Mini-Labs” throughout the state of Mississippi to distribute the case-load of digital forensic investigation here

The training provided by the NFTC is free for the students that qualify for it.

Now that I am working at the NFTC, I will be wearing many hats:

• I will be updating the curriculum for classes we are currently teaching, and developing material for new classes (I am especially excited about adding a network forensics course later this year)
• I will be teaching the courses that we have developed to law enforcement and veterans, in our teaching lab at MSU, and wherever else we travel to teach our classes
• I will be working to build up a research focus at the NFTC, using our time between classes to develop and publish new digital forensic techniques and tools, free for use by our students and the digital forensics community as a whole.

I’m very excited about bringing my background with security, vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing to the forensics field in this job, and I’m looking forward to publishing more of our efforts in this area.  I will be blogging about forensics more often here, although it will always have a slant that will be interesting to security professionals.  We’ll also be unveiling a new NFTC website soon that will have better information about upcoming classes, and forensics news, whitepapers, and tools that will be of use to those outside of the community of our students too.