What Every Engineer Should Know About Cyber Security and Digital Forensics

15

2

Cyber Security and Digital Forensics Careers

In the middle of difculty lies opportunity.

—Albert Einstein

2.1 Introduction

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Connecticut, lost her career and had

her life turned upside down due to a malicious spyware application and

the incompetence of security “professionals.” The spyware was running on

the classroom computer causing pornographic images to be shown. Julie

innocently checked her personal e-mail using that classroom computer, left

the room briey, and upon her return saw, as did a few students, the por-

nography on the computer screen. The pornography pop-ups

*

were caused

by spyware inadvertently installed when another user of that classroom

computer downloaded a Halloween screen saver. Because of the school’s

amateur IT administrator, overreaction from a school principal, faulty

forensic examination of the physical evidence, and false testimony from a

computer forensics “expert,” she was prosecuted and convicted (later over-

turned) of risk of injury to a minor.

†

What we can take away from this case is the importance of having a quali-

ed computer forensics

‡

examiner acquiring and analyzing evidence in addi-

tion to having a qualied information security professional protecting the

critical assets of the enterprise. This includes training the employees on the

proper use of the company computers as well as what to do when an incident

occurs. We will address all of these topics later in this book, but for now we

will discuss the numerous career opportunities in the eld of information

and cyber security as well as describe how to become a qualied profes-

sional in this exploding eld.

*

A pop-up is a browser window that appears out of nowhere when a web page is visited.

Sometimes the pop-ups are advertisements and sometimes they are malicious programs that

will install the undesirable content to the machine upon clicking.

†

The technical details of this case can be found in Eckelberry et al. (2007).

‡

Computer forensics is also known as digital forensics. The terms are used interchangeably in

this book.