What DOES a FORENSIC EXPERT DO and HOW to WORK in it? | CYBERSECURITY

On this channel we’ve seen the ones who attack and the ones who defend, but we rarely ask what happens afterward, once the bad guy has done his work and someone has to carry the disaster into a courtroom. For that I’m joined by Pilar Vila, a forensic expert, who got here from development and vocational teaching, after a forensics course at the College of Computer Engineering of Galicia hooked her on a field that was then almost untouched.

Pilar describes a job that looks little like the American TV shows. Most of her cases are mobile phones and WhatsApp, information leaks by employees, unfair competition and those email scams that switch the bank account on you, which have shot up since the pandemic. She talks about the tension between the technical world, where something is either a zero or a one, and the legal one, full of nuance, and about why she only takes on cases she considers defensible. She leaves us a good anecdote: a client who swore he was innocent until a deep analysis proved exactly the opposite.

We agree on the usual point, that here a good technician is badly paid and that to climb in salary you almost have to leave the technical side behind. As she sums it up, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.