Out now: Hands-on Incident Response and Digital Forensics!
This week I was able to check a career goal off of the list thanks to the folks at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, who published my latest work, ‘Hands-on Incident Response and Digital Forensics’.
I love technical books. I can recall many a night spent studying from them while exploring a new topic, be it in the information security, server administration or network engineering realms.
The technical books that I love the most always include case studies, and real-life examples that back up the technical content. That’s why, in writing this book, I made sure I interlaced the technical content with various stories from my own career that show the theory in action.
The premise of the book is that although incident response and digital forensics are frequently bundled together, which makes sense, as they’re both disciplines within information security that strive for resolution. The truth, is that sometimes you might be forced to pick one approach over the other to best handle the situation you find yourself in. For this reason, part one of the book is about handling security incidents, part two focuses on digital forensics, and throughout both parts you’ll the find the linkages and pivot points between the two.
I’ve also made a deliberate effort to focus on the human impacts associated with this work. Security incidents, and digital crimes impact real people, including victims, investigators and suspects. Quite honestly, I feel like this is an underreported aspect of working in this field. There are some truths in the book that I wish I’d have been privy to before I started working in it. Not so I could find another line of work, but just so I could’ve been better prepared to make the transition from pure ‘techie’ to ‘techie doing things that result in consequences for real people’.
You can check out a PDF preview of the book here.
You can purchase a paperback, or digital copy, from various bookstores, some of which I’ve listed below:
Anywhere: BCS Store
UK: Amazon.co.uk | Blackwells | Waterstones | WHSmith
USA: Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble
If you pick up a copy, I truly hope you love it. I worked hard on create something that covers a lot of material, in a manner that is easy to follow and digest. I love this industry, and to think that someone just like me will be reading and learning from a book I wrote fills me with so much joy, it’s hard to explain!
Finally, this book wouldn’t have been possible without the support and encouragement of others. Thanks to everyone who has ever taken a chance on me in a job interview, in doing so, you gave me the chance to learn new skills and put them into practice. Thanks to my family for giving me the time to write, and for understanding when I’ve been on-call. Thanks to Rajeev Singh, the CEO of Accolade and co-founder of Concur, who contributed the foreword. Thanks to BCS for allowing me to write this book, and thanks to everyone in the industry who has encouraged me.
