The SANS Institute and Cybersecurity Careers

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: Welcome to Digital Detectives, reports from the battlefront.  We’ll discuss computer forensics, electronic discovery, and information security issues and what’s really happening in the trenches; not theory, but practical information that you can use in your law practice.  Right here on the Legal Talk Network.

Sharon D. Nelson: Welcome to the 131st Edition of Digital Detectives.  We’re glad to have you with us.  I’m Sharon Nelson, President of Sensei Enterprises.  A digital forensics; manage cybersecurity and manage information technology firm in Fairfax, Virginia.

John W. Simek: And I’m John Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises.  Today on Digital Detectives, our topic is the SANS Institute and Cybersecurity Careers.

Sharon D. Nelson: Before we get started, I’d like to thank our sponsors pinow.com and CaseFleet.

John W. Simek: Today, our guest is Rob Lee.  The Chief Curriculum Director and Faculty Lead at SANS Institute.  Rob runs his own consulting business specializing in information security, incident response, threat hunting, and digital forensics.  For more than 20 years of experience in digital forensics, vulnerability and exploit discovery, intrusion detection prevention and incident response, he is known as the godfather of DFIR.  Rob co-authored the book Know Your Enemy 2nd Edition and is course co-author of FOR500:  Windows Forensic Analysis and FOR508:  Advanced Incident Response, Threat Hunting, and Digital Forensics.  It’s been way too long Rob, and great to have you back.

Rob Lee: Thanks for having me, really happy to be here.  Thank you.

Sharon D. Nelson: Why don’t we start rob by having you tell us a little bit about the SANS Institute because I’m sure there are people listening who don’t know what it is.  How it’s organized, what it does, how long it’s been around; whatever you think might be important to know.

Rob Lee: Yeah, no problem.  So, I’ve been working with the SANS Institute on and off for about 20 years.  The SANS Institute is primarily a training organization that focuses on not only training but research and community development.  We have a lot of free resources, capabilities, but what we’re mostly known for is our training curriculum.  My previous role had me lead the Digital Forensics and Incident Response curriculum, but we have the offensive operations curriculum, leadership management, blue team operations and of course new cyber in addition to our brand-new curriculums, industrial control systems and cloud.  So, you know, as with the growing information security world, we are trying to keep (00:02:39) with all new capabilities out there and threats that are eventually involving organizations and you know, really having train for both those in the expert side as well as those brand-new forensics.  Now, the interesting thing about SANS is that those who author for SANS are full-time practitioners.  No one is a full-time instructor; we don’t hire our instructors (00:03:02) that basically we find through our summits.  Each curriculum holds the summit or you know, inviting people to come author and teach their courses and usually, most cases, those individuals who are teaching the course were practicing the stuff they were teaching the week before out there in the field.  And we have over 100 instructors and almost 70 courses now at SANS basically really trying to teach organizations and individuals best practices and we update our courses so frequently that many people are shocked that some of the latest attacks that just came out weeks ago are in course where a few days later.  I’m trying to talk about the relevance about how those attacks could potentially impact their own organizations.

John W. Simek: Rob, you touched a little bit on it, but can you go on a little more detail about how people generally get involved with SANS as an instructor and I’m really curious as to how did you get involved yourself?

Rob Lee: That’s a great question.  So, there’s several different ways to get involved with the SANS Institute as an instructor.  In many cases, the way I was finding instructors is we would see someone with particular set of expertise and skills.  For example, Eric Zimmerman took one of my classes and he I just started chatting and found out that he was actually extremely decent already at the material.  And I said “Why aren’t you teaching this?”  And started bringing him, seeing if he wanted to start teaching.  And of course, Eric Zimmerman is well known for the EZ Tools, Eric Zimmerman tools that are out there for utilities in the community.  And also, partially funded by the SANS Institute.  So, that’s one way.  We find a person we know, a person that we see out there.  Another way is that we – someone who certifies through our GIAC certification program knows the highest scores out there are invited to apply to be an instructor and we go through a rigorous betting process that helps identify these candidates that are out there.

(00:05:00)

And of course, we have, — go to third-party events, we also host around summits where we have speakers and we potentially talk about different techniques and new challenges that they have encountered out there.  And in many cases, we’ll find someone who is interested in teaching through that mechanism.  Now, to teach for SANS (00:05:17), like, “Hey, we identified you’d be throwing in front of the classroom”.  We go through a rigorous betting process and training process for every instructor until they finally become certified.  In many cases, it takes over a year and a year and a half to develop a full-time instructor at SANS.  Meaning that they are fully certified, that they could teach a class solo by themselves and because of how in-depth their material is, we want to make sure that for someone who is signing up for our courses, they know what they’re doing, that they’ve been taught the best teaching practices that are out there; and also, they are experts in the field and they have a passion for doing it.  You could tell, really bad instructors, they don’t have that presence in the room, they’re not invigorating the people, they don’t love the material, and that can’t happen at SANS.  We basically really go out of our way to make sure those we put in front of the classroom are the most engaging teachers and instructors out there because they are practicing it but then they love teaching others the same material; really building up the community.

Sharon D. Nelson: It’s kind of daunting that you say that you have so many courses, over 70 of them.  I know a lot of folks look around to look for some kind of training.  If they were to look for SANS training, how would you recommend that they proceed?  How should they make a decision on what to take?

Rob Lee: I mean, typically, here’s the thing I always tell people; it’s like, right now, especially in the information security field, if you’re just starting out, we highly recommend you got to learn the fundamentals.  It’s almost that there’s a lot of echoes back into both the legal profession in addition to medical professions is that you need to understand the fundamentals how law or biology and core medical techniques work.  And then you become more focused.  You take your focus areas that you become a practitioner and saying – whether it’s family law, criminal, or whether you need to go down and say “Hey, I’m going to be a foot doctor or whether I’m going to be an ob-gyn.  These are specialization fields, and the same thing happens in the information security community.  What I found is that because of the rapid advancement of technologies that are out there that almost immediately after you learn some of the fundamentals, you probably need to start specializing.  And specializations occur within the different curricula that we now have.  Whether you are going t go into digital forensics and do investigations, whether it would be for law enforcement or doing incident response, whether you’re doing SOC operations and moving into blue team operations, whether you’d become a cloud expert, each of these have its own really in-depth niche areas that you would start to focus in on knows we also have beginner, immediate and advanced courses in each one of those fields as well.  Where we usually see the mistakes of individuals is they bite off more than they could chew.  They choose a class that’s more advanced than they’re able to understand at that point.  And I really tell people, it’s like, really make sure you have the fundamentals down before you decide to go to me.  So, if we say a course is advanced, it is advanced.  It is a sink or swim, breathing down the water from a firehose level of material that’s going to be thrown at you and we really try to invigorate that through hands-on exercises, but even with those hands-on exercises, if you don’t have the fundamentals down, they’re going to be extremely dauting.  For example, in our reverse-engineering malware course, you need to know a little bit of coding in order to reverse code.  These are some of the things that we don’t stop and say let’s teach coded writing” in order for you to reverse code analysis.  We’re expecting the prereqs to be met before someone sits a class; but really size yourself up and have an understanding of where you actually fed if you’re just starting out, intermediate and starting to choose in each area; or if you’re advanced and really try to get a focused specialization at that point.

Sharon D. Nelson: I think that’s going to be one of the best tips that a lot of folks who think they want go into cybersecurity are going to hear in this podcast.

Rob Lee: Oh yeah.

John W. Simek: Wait a minute Rob, it’s not point and click?

Rob Lee: It could be.  There is a lot.  There’s a lot of point and click interfaces out there now, thanks to the betters(ph) but you still need to understand what it’s telling you.

John W. Simek: Yup.  Rob, I’m sure a lot of listeners are going to be surprised that there’s more than half a million cybersecurity jobs that go unfilled every year according to the recent stats, why do you think that is?

Rob Lee: There’s too many positions, not enough people.  It’s such a growing field and it’s growing wider.  I mean, you take a look at for example, cloud, everyone because of COVID has shift a lot of resources and capabilities into the cloud away from their brick and mortar hold off the spaces.  So, trying to understand how to manage and secure your assets in the cloud, for whether you’re dealing with software versus services, whether you’re doing infostructure sitting on the cloud, how do you defend that?

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How do you monitor it?  You can’t just use the same capabilities that you did from the original SOC days in order to do intrusion detection.  So, it requires a massive amount of knowledge to do that.  What about incident response?  Now, we’re having most firms out there where they’ll have a dedicated incident response team.  Who is going to have that experience?  Where are you going to find these individuals?  What I also find is a lot of organizations out there will say “Hey, I’m looking for entry-level cybersecurity analyst” and a course on their job requisite they’ll say “five years’ experience”.  It’s the old joke that we’re all running around in the community with right now, it’s like “Hey I’m looking for someone with 12 years of Kubernetes experience.”  Well, the junk is, Kubernetes has not been around for 12 years, but it’s (00:10:50) really to put that down because it’s like, “Well, I better see (00:10:54)” because everyone lies on their resumes, right?  Trying to find those initial entry level positions is hard because a lot of organizations, they overshoot. Versus saying “Hey listen; we will train you, we’re going to bring you in, we just need to show a little of a basic competence in order for you to see your first job in cyber; but maintaining and retaining those individuals ends up being hard too because that’s the other unsaid truth that’s out there.  A lot of organizations are saying “Hey, to fill positions, I’m going to recruit heavily on LinkedIn and through other things and saying hey, do you want to make another — $25k to $30k a year?  Come work for us.”  And so, people are constantly switching jobs right now, and you see it in the LinkedIn resumes; look at the average time and tenure at an organization for a standard cybersecurity analyst.  It is a year to a year and a half because they’re stalling, it sounds evil but when you want for more money to an Invidia has a little bit of talent because you need to have an unfilled position; of course, they’re going to move over there, especially if they’re able to do virtual remote work for that organization.

Sharon D. Nelson: Well, John and I are constantly talking to young folks especially those who are getting ready to think about going to college; and they’re interested in cybersecurity.  They tend to pick that up somewhere in high school; but they ask us about college courses that we would recommend if their goal is to get into cybersecurity.  So, what would you tell them that they should think about taking in college to start preparing for this?

Rob Lee: Obviously, something in the sciences field will always help.  But again, this is where there’s an angel of argument.  I tend to (00:12:30) a little bit, do you need a computer science degree in order to go into cybersecurity?  In certain aspects, the answer is a 100% no and the reason why is a lot of computer science degrees focus in on architecture, the actual computer circuits, almost like electrical engineering does.  It focuses on the concepts in the science which is good for understanding how binary and numbering works and basic logic of the programing language is, but in many cases, you don’t need those skills in the cybersecurity world.  Any technical field you’re finding yourself into, and I usually tell people, I say “Take a look if there’s any IT, any focused areas that lead you into cybersecurity in a college degree program and start taking a look if there’s even a Batchelor’s program in your college” and they do exist out there, and the question that you’ll have though is how relevant are they.  Are they able to keep up with the latest technology releases that are out there?  If you’re taking a smartphone class, are we analyzing iOS 10, even though 14 is out, it’s so hard to keep up to date with the latest technology releases that a lot of colleges out there are struggling just like everyone else.  Maintaining congruency with the current technology is not like basic sciences that exist out there.  Cellular, chloroform and basic biology doesn’t change, but computer science is constantly is changing with the latest capabilities that are out there.  Take ransomware for example; one of the biggest issues out there in cybersecurity today; a couple of years ago, no one would look up or down with that, saying ransomware, it’s kind of a nuisance, but now it’s a major issue.  So, do your programs even teach that, like what is it, what does it look like, how would you finish or remediate it, prevent it, and so forth.  So, a lot of graduates from these programs walk out of the programs and say “Hey, we’re trying to defend against ransomware” and guess what?  The person is like “I’ve never seen it, I don’t know what to do with it and hopefully you could teach me.  And the organizations get a little bit frustrated to the college program and saying “I thought you had a degree in this, why aren’t you useful to me?”  In the military and DOD and a lot of the government-level programs are also running on the same issues that people are going into their first career and their commanders are looking at them saying “You don’t have the right skills to do the job today”.  And that’s one of the things that’s frustrating out there for a lot of people in the – you’ll get the basics and that’s why you should go to college, get the basics.  But understand what you’re signing up for is a constant learning from this point forward in your life.  Just like those in the pharmaceutical fields and everything else.

(00:15:01)

Like, what you knew yesterday is completely antiquated today.  You need to constantly be ready to open up the book, crack open your own research, learn and dig into the binary yourself in order to maintain your own skill sets, no one else is going to do it better than you and you cannot simply rely on the education programs out there.  Even though they’re from the SANS Institute, I always tell people this, it’s like, “Your learning shouldn’t stop with what’s on paper here”, it doesn’t mean you’re done, it doesn’t mean “I’ve learned Windows forensics, I’m now a Windows forensics expert”.  It means that just wait two until the latest patch upgrade occurs, and you’re going to need to learn it again; everything might change.  And this constant cycle of frustration and trying to stay ahead of it and frustration trying to stay ahead of it that someone entering in this field, either they love it or they hate it.  If you love it, then you’re the type that is constantly loving to learn, loving to problem solve and you go back to formal education for the core aspects of it, and then come out in the field saying “Okay, now it’s up to me to continue my education as much as possible.

Sharon D. Nelson: Rob, I would add one more thing to the advice that I usually give them and that is to make sure they take some writing courses, because they have to write professional reports usually somewhere along the way.  They’re writing, they’re doing security assessments and there’s paper generated after that with all the results, they may be doing digital forensic stuff and that involves reports and writing too, and that’s what most of these college students seem to lack is a real writing background; especially professional writing.  SO, I think that’s one important thing for them to have.  Would you agree with me?

Rob Lee: Oh, totally.  Right?  We actually – SANS has a writing course written by Lenny Zeltser for that reason and it is a part of our graduate and undergraduate programs we have at SANS as well.  It is an important skill and again, easy to sit there, I don’t need to write, I just don’t know how to code, but even if you’re a coder, being able to document and write how to use your programs is essential and not only that presentation skills too, to be able to stand up and to be able to describe a problem, how you solve a problem, how you can move forward through a problem.  A lot of people end up not moving forward in their careers because they lack both writing and presentation skills and capabilities and so, it’s something I highly recommend those where there’s like “How do I move forward in my career?”  “How do I become a managing director of X, Y and Z?”  And so, well that’s easy.  I said “You need to learn how to write, you need to learn how to present, and you need to do it in a way that is – takes technical piece of information and presents in a way so management can make a decision based off of what you’re telling them.  They should not be looking at you like you just spoke about something no one understands.  Take the average parent out there that heard about the Twitch compromise the past couple of days and they’re like “Wait, what’s Twitch?” and everyone who uses Twitch right now does a big eye roll.  Like, “How do you not know what Twitch is?”  But again, that’s what happens.  You need to be able to explain what is Twitch in a way that people say “Oh, I didn’t know that existed”.  There are generational gaps that occur, that’s a part of this.  And one more point on this, and this is something else that you guys might recognize; but we’re now at a point in the career cycle of many people out there been doing this for 20 years and you end up like – yeah, I call them the 20-year gray beards, gray-haired individuals that are out there, it’s like “I don’t need more training.”  The scary part is, they’re the ones that –it’s like they’re sitting on typewriters with the word processor sitting in front of them, “All I know how to do is type.”  If they’ve not been – back to training, if you’ve not been back to training, you’re missing a lot and I’ve done this even with some of our instructors.  I said “How many of you really know cloud?”  And they’re like blink-blink, blink-blink, I said “Okay guys, get into these cloud courses.”  Everything is moving toward the cloud right now.  If you think because I’ve been doing this for 20 years and everyone sees you as an expert and everyone is just “Yep, you’re the expert, you’ve never failed me before, your skills are about to turn on a dime because you’re not maintaining congruency with the latest technologies that are out there, you have to go back to school, you have to go back and get a new core that’s out there, admit your frailty, admit that you need to learn again to maintain your expertise.  You can’t do it on reputation alone anymore.  And so, there’s a lot of people out there that are scared, they’re actually going to be asked a question as an expert, and they’re not going to know the answer.  So, they fake it really well, but in reality, I’m just saying no one wants to see them go back to school, it’s like “Wow, it’s looks like I don’t know something; you need to go back to school.”  We’re at now at that stage again, it’s like the full cycle has occurred that people started out in the field back in the late 90s, early 200s, you who am I taking about, you need to take more courses.  I guarantee it right now, take a course, you need to bring your skills up to date.  You may not think it, but I guess you’re embarrassed about it a little bit but everyone needs that right now.  Sharon and John, you probably see me “Oh my god, he’s talking about me too.”

(00:20:04)

Yes, I’m talking about you guys.  If you don’t know exactly what is going on in the cloud, guess what?  You need to go take a class.

John W. Simek: Oh yeah.  I’m with you 100% Rob.  Before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick commercial break.

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Sharon D. Nelson: Welcome back to Digital Detectives on the Legal Talk Network.  Today, our topic is the SANS Institute and Cybersecurity Careers.  Our guest is Rob Lee, the chief curriculum director and facility lead at SANS.  Rob runs his own consulting business specializing in information security, incident response, threat-hunting and digital forensics.  With more than 20 years of experience in digital forensics, vulnerability and exploit discovery, intrusion detection/prevention and incident response, he is known as the god father of DFIR.

John W. Simek: Rob, people move down the career path towards cybersecurity, what kind of certifications would you suggest they go for?

Rob Lee: Certifications is a great question.  It really comes down to you need to establish your core, you need to establish that you can sit an entry or intermediate level job.  And so, I always go back to you the core certifications that are out there and there’s plenty of them that I would take a look at, but if you’re just starting out in technology, A+ certifications are amazing.  It shows you “Hey, you can master the technologies, then you start taking to look at what SANS has, our GIAC Certification, our security essential certification, we also have a new foundations level certification for those just entering the field, the GIAC also would help establish that.  And then moving into niche areas, I would definitely look at getting certified in cloud or incident response.  As we’re moving forward, certification does not mean you’re a master, it means that you’ve mastered the core and you’re able to basically, just like the analogy I always use is you graduated from basic training in that particular subject area, it doesn’t mean your going to be a ninja warrior and able to handle anything, but it basically means that you’re going to be able to work your way through core problems.

Sharon D. Nelson: What are the hottest areas in cybersecurity right now?  That’s what people ask a lot too.

Rob Lee: Cloud and industrial control systems, by far.  Those two in particular, there’s not enough cloud understanding, expertise, and cloud is consistently changing on a daily basis.  I’m not kidding, it is a daily basis, that is something that you have new capabilities that are deployed by the major cloud providers, and you also have to worry about all the software as a service provider.  Whether or not your infrastructure is sitting inside GCP or Azure, you’re also taking a look at Salesforce and you have private PI data sitting in there, how would you respond to a Salesforce breach or somebody without a compromised – from some of those applications.  Zoom even, we’re using Zoom on this call right now, is how much of that data, you’re using Zoom as an infrastructure, you’re logging in, what if someone breaks into one of these calls and listens in during a very private conversation between legal representatives and the executive board of the company.  These things are definitely happening out there, so cloud and could security is essential at this point, it’s one of the hottest areas.  The second one, also because it’s barely unknown, but it’s the opposite issue.  We’re dealing with technologies from the 1960s and 1970s that are driving a lot of infostructure that they simply plug in the internet and said “Hey, there’s a control mechanism, we’re going to put on this on/off switch” and those on/off switches are targeted by nation state adversaries.  How do you defend against the industrial control systems that are out there, how do you secure it, there’s a lot of folks out there that don’t understand the fundamentals and requires a little bit of background and double E, but also requires a lot of knowledge and standard information, security and networking of how people have attached these devices to the internet in a relatively insecure manner and it’s driving pipelines, it’s driving traffic control systems and water plants and you name it.

(00:25:26)

It becomes almost on the scary side when you think of the implications some of these things are potentially targeted and we did see that this past year with the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that in due diligence of not knowing how bad the breach was, they shut down the pipeline rightfully so, but it wasn’t as direct result of the ransomware or is it because of precautionary measures.  And again, because there’s not a lot of expertise out there to analyze it, guess what?  You’ll see organizations go full throttle and you see people like, waiting in line for gas for up to four days after that attack.  And that’s not sensational as everyone saw it on the news.

John W. Simek: We see a lot of things going on, we had the CSI effect that brought a lot of interest in the digital forensics, I know you and I experienced that early on.  But there’s a lot today going on in cybersecurity and a lot of interest because of movies and TV shows that make it really seem kind of glamorous.  So, number one, is it really glamorous?  And number two, can anyone, anyone at all make it in the cybersecurity world?

Rob Lee: I’ll start with the later question.  I truly believe if you have a passion, you love technology and you really like problem solving, information security or anything in information technology is going to be your jam.  Even if you started off “Hey, I was a cartoonist for Marvel Comics and I decided to get into information security” I’ve seen people make that transition, everything is teachable.  I know for a fact if I wanted to learn the piano today, I would be able to do it, there’s enough training programs out there to bring me up to speed with reading music and basic melodies that are incorporated there, the same thing occurs in information security.  There’s such a need right now for professionals that are entering the field that you would not be made fun of by looking at it and no matter what stage of life that you’re in.  It is for everyone and it is entirely fun.  Now, is it glamorous?  Yes and no.  As with every career out there and what you see in the movies, not everything looks like the matrix; but as with every job that’s out there, it is what you make it.  It is like if you enjoy defending networks, if you enjoy trying to find holes in networks or doing investigations, that’s why the niche areas exist, you’ll kind of find your – this is my thing.  I didn’t like the attacking systems, but I like doing investigations, like I’m helping people.  Those are the types of things that depending on your personality, you’re going to find whether you’d be your left or right, and that’s where you’re going to feel like “Hey, I am paid to do what I love, I can’t believe people actually pay for this, I love this.”  That’s where it makes it glamorous, it’s not about glamour, it’s about do you find your soul while working and you wake up everyday and say “Well, I can’t believe I’m doing this.”  You kind of know you’re there when you’re working at night and your spouse or your partners or your friends looking and say “Hey, are you working or are you playing?”  And you actually look at them and say “I actually don’t know.  Yes?”

Sharon D. Nelson: I guess you’re a lot like us, we have fun doing things that other people think are very strange indeed.  We’ve talked to a lot of people maybe in their 40s and 50s, especially those with some kind of technology background; and they ask if they could consider a career in cybersecurity.  I think they’re wondering when and if it’s too late to reinvent themselves, what would you tell those people?

Rob Lee: Never too late.  It really isn’t.  It honestly comes to down to it as one of – when I was in my 20s and I was working as a manager, one of the consulting firms in the DC area; one of the most talented individuals I had and I have to admit, a little bit, it ages him when he came on my team, he was three times retired from the military, then from the CIA and then from the actual organization he’s working for and he came back for his fourth job and he was in his late 60s; and he became one of the most dependable individuals on the team, we would throw anything at him, it was like the Mikey Would Eat It Commercial, it’s like (00:29:30) would take it, he would want it, —

John W. Simek: You are dating yourself, Rob.

Rob Lee: I know.  I totally dated myself.  He would take it, he would learn it, but initially, it’s like he probably really doesn’t like this stuff, but he was like just determined; he was, I’ll admit, initially a little bit slower just because he was learning a long the way, but everything that we threw at him, he just would plod through it and by the end of my work with him, like if ever wanted something done and done well, I would give it to him.  And he was in his late 60s when he took this up, never coded ever in his life.  And by the time he was done with us, he was one of the best coders on the team.

(00:30:03)

Sharon D. Nelson: Very inspirational.

John W. Simek: Yup.  Well, our final question for you Rob and maybe a softball for you, and I know a lot of our listeners would be fascinated by your opinions on this, but do you have any predictions about the future of cybersecurity at all?  We know it moves really, really fast, but what are your thoughts on that?

Rob Lee: I kind of make fun of people with the predictions, it’s because that they’re the same thing every single year, is this a problem that’s going to go away?  No.  Are we going to see in our lifetime a major attack that is going to occur that is going to be devastating as a result of cyber?  Yes.  Predictions come down to that every aspect of an individual’s life is touched by technology at this point.  It is impossible to get around it, but even parents trying to secure their kids, trying to understand their core devices and how do they make sure that they can monitor and make sure their kids aren’t being part of predators, everyone has a need for basic information security knowledge at this point, and its awareness and more that is making this a major career filed from here forward.  And so, my prediction is, is that cybersecurity is a long-term career field for anyone who wants to enter into it.  As much as pharmaceuticals, also never go medical, will never go away.  As long as we’re dealing with digital devices and they’re tied to us in three or four different ways and you look at the number if IP addresses in your home that is attached to your router, information security is here and it’s going to be essential for people and experts out there to say, your neighbors can ask you “Hey, should I be worried about my fridge being attached to the network?”  And maybe, maybe not?  But at the same time, is that an entry way into something else in your network that is more valuable for an attacker.  So, yeah.  My prediction is basically that.  This is a wonderful field to go into, and it does not matter your age, if you like technology, if you like surfing the internet, if you like learning, own this, this is your time, do this.  There’s a ton of jobs out there for you right now.

Sharon D. Nelson: Well, I’m sure that you have inspired a number of people listening to you today and you just bubble over with enthusiasm, it’s like a fountain going off.  I mean that very sincerely and as a great compliment.  I mean, you clearly love what you do and you communicate your enthusiasm to other.  So, I think those who are listening, they’re going to learn just a ton about all of this and have many other questions answered.  So, thank you so much Rob for being with us as our guest today.

Rob Lee: One additional thing out there is those just starting out, sans.org/free is a really good resource that you go turn to for a ton of free resources that SANS provides those whose that’s just starting out.  So, check it out, if you’re looking at just saying “Hey, where do I begin?” that’s a good point out on our website.

John W. Simek: Well, that does it for this edition of Digital Detectives.  And remember, you can subscribe to all the editions of this podcast at legaltalknetwork.com or on Apple Podcast.  If you enjoyed our podcast, please rate us on Apple Podcast.

Sharon D. Nelson: And you can find out more about Sensei’s digital forensics technology and cybersecurity services at senseient.com.  We’ll see you next time to Digital Detectives.

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Outro: Thanks for listening to Digital Detectives on The Legal Talk Network.  Check out some of our other podcasts on legaltalknetwork.com and on iTunes.

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Podcast transcription by Tech-Synergy.com