In our increasingly interconnected world, the need for skilled digital investigators has never been greater. From cybercrime to corporate espionage, these digital detectives play a crucial role in uncovering truth and ensuring justice. But what exactly makes a good digital investigator, and how can you cultivate these essential traits?

Let’s reflect on some of those skills that give you the foundation to move forward as a digital investigator.

Logical Thinking: The Foundation of Forensic Analysis

At its core, digital forensics is about piecing together a complex puzzle from fragments of data. This demands a highly developed sense of logical thinking and constructing a narrative, identifying inconsistencies, and forming hypotheses based on cold, hard data facts.

Although you might think this is just something every DFIR is born with it is a learned skill that is refined throughout your career. Here are some methods I use to improve my logical skills.

Practice Problem-Solving:

Engage in activities that train your mind to identify patterns and deduce solutions. This might be the casual puzzle or the more complex mathematical/computer programming problems that require logical and analytical thinking to solve through script writing or practicing reverse engineering or database reconstruction. There is a large range of options. So, what do people do when they are just getting started to build up these skills?

Start by looking at some of the free capture the flag activities that are offered. SANS Digital Forensics Blog has some good examples that allow you to go through detailed case studies and walkthroughs, focusing on the methodology used, not just the outcome.

Working on some of those programming skills there are great free and paid programs for an introduction to Python at Codecademy or freeCodeCamp.  Python gets you an introduction into the common script language that many of the commercial and open-source tools use to make specific functions for artifact analysis, etc.

Patience: The Virtue of the Persistent Investigator

Digital investigations are rarely a sprint; they’re often a marathon. You might spend hours, days, or even weeks sifting through vast amounts of data, encountering dead ends, and meticulously documenting every detail. Impatience can lead to overlooked clues or rushed conclusions.

This is one of my areas that can cause frustration and something I work on all the time. I will work on activities that require sustained attention and detail. Some of those might be reworking workflows for evidence, validating forensic tools, and setting up virtual machines with different operating systems and configurations based on case type.

Although you might find that these are not the most exciting tasks, they help your workflow and help train your mind to maintain calm persistence when faced with tedious tasks. Just remember the tedious side of documentation as that is a fundamental function for any digital investigator.

Relentless Curiosity: The Engine of Discovery

A digital investigator is, by nature, a seeker of knowledge. Relentless curiosity is what drives you to ask “why,” to dig deeper, and to explore every potential avenue for information and understanding. This is more of a natural skill that I look for when I add to my team. My neurodivergence helps as well with this as both sides of my brain are always thinking.

One of the ways to continue to build your creative mind is sharing your research and perspective. Doing a blog like this one or guest posts force you to think from multiple perspectives that include that creative side. It is an excellent way to stay on top of trends, techniques, and more.

Next get your hands dirty by exploring different artifacts while exploring different tools. I try to focus on a specific hypothesis on an artifact and look at the different tools on how they see or find the data. It is a fascinating process that makes me keep perspective and helps me test at the same time. Many of the tools out there have trial versions and that is all you need to get started.

Bringing It All Together: The Holistic Investigator

These three skills of Logical Thinking, Patience, and Relentless Curiosity are most powerful when combined. Whether you focus on DFIR, OSINT or cyber the core skillsets will equip you to navigate the complexities of the digital world and uncover the hidden truths within.