anyone know anything about Computer Forensics?

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My husband and I are always on the outlook for good career possibilities for our son, who is currently high-school aged. We were very lucky, in that our older son (who is undiagnosed, but definitely would have been on the spectrum as a child) went into a career that we helped steer him towards. When he was a senior in high school, we watched him develop an interest in geography, so the three of us explored various careers that might involve geography. He settled on urban planning, and is now in graduate school.

Our younger son has shown a slight interest in computers. We don't know if this interest will last (he's only 14), but we want to expose him to as much of this as we can. We also want to start talking about the career possibilities, and the pitfalls of some career choices vs. others (ex. outsourcing for computer programmers, whereas there may be other career paths in computers that may be less likely to be outsourced). My husband has looked into computer forensics -- and thinks there's the possibility that this may eventually be a good fit for our son.

Are any of you WrongPlanet members in computer forensics? If not, do you know anything about it?

Take into account anything computer related requires the person to be very flexible when it comes to routines (work schedule will be constantly changed.. its not a 9 to 5 job) and very,very on top of his field since almost everything changes completely every 5 to 10 years.

computer forensics requires both engineering background (to handle the physical electronic components) and programming/software background (encryption/decryption/recovery). Basically he needs to be quite good at math.

So far it would seem that my son is quite good at math, so I'm not too concerned about that. He also does well with changes in routine -- in fact, he prefers them.

My one concern is a fact that you mentioned, Dantac -- that everything changes every 5 to 10 years. I've read that this can become a problem for older computer programmers -- as you not only need to know the new languages, but have experience them -- which is harder to come by, if you're an older programmer who only has experience with Cobol (just an example -- you know what I mean).

Dantac, are you in the computer industry?

I've done IT and while i personally do not do computer forensics I did have the opportunity to work with people that do & see what they did.

What I meant by 'change' is that there are always new protocols and standards coming out that applies both to hardware and programming methods. In IT we had to keep up not only with the new ones but also with the old ones.. the people that did forensics not only had to keep up with them but also know intimately how they worked.

To give you an example, the forensic guys which were trying to recover data from a dead hard drive had to know everything about that particular hard drive's physical components and how it worked.. they had to know every step of the way how a computer processes the HD data (we're talking down to machine code here) and how the particular operating system thats in the HD stored the data. Those guys received hard drives that had burn marks, others that were crushed.. and some in perfect condition that had been screwed up by viruses.

My dept on the other hand.. oh your HD was burnt/crushed/virus and its inside warranty? *click* we're sending you a new one by mail! what? your data? sorry that isnt covered by warranty (noot touching that with a 10ft pole!). XD

If he's into computers and you want to steer him .. forensics would be good if he can handle it. You can also introduce him to careers that focus on maintaining the infrastructure (networking, information technology..things like that) since those jobs really cant be outsourced the way programmers and graphic artists have been.