Moving On to New Career Opportunities

In the next few days I will be moving on from my current work and into a new and exciting opportunity. As I work through this effort, while writing a book and preparing con talks, I started to think of the practical and emotional tasks needed to ensure that my current employer and clients are taken care of while I prepare for the future.

In this effort, I wanted to pass on a few ideas that may help others.

Personal Side

To begin with, let's discuss the personal side to the move. I've been working with the Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) for almost 14 years. I've been with them since before they were even named DC3, and were just the Defense Computer Forensics Lab (DCFL) and the Defense Cyber Investigations Training Program (DCITP a.k.a. The 'TIP). Also, since we had "Cyber" in our agency name since the late 90's, I'm fully allowed to use it in regular conversation without drinks.

I've said goodbye to DC3 once before, temporarily, as I moved on from being the Deputy Technical Lead of the Training Academy. I left with the weight of a serious case of burnout and needed a break. Getting into the down and dirty of regular forensic work was the fix.

I joined my good friends Eoghan Casey, Terrance Maguire, and Chris Daywalt in their venture, cmdLabs. We worked out awesome incident response cases together and delved into research projects and code development. At about this time, cmdLabs was acquired by Newberry Group, run by a CEO and VP that I had known for over a decade. Life was good and, after a cool-down period, I went back into DC3 on a separate contract to work on their Intrusions team.