Hi, I’m Lesley. It’s very nice to meet you. You might know me better as Hacks4Pancakes. I think it is high time I introduce myself.

I’m one of these  and I do this for a living:

OK, not quite, it’s actually more like:with a lot of

I have been working professionally in Information Security for about 8 years, and have been working in IT for about 15 years, interrupted by stints I spent doing other interesting things like this:

My current profession is leading a digital forensics and incident response team, which sounds exciting and glamorous but mostly means I get to stay up late watching loading bars pensively, and going through deleted internet browsing history looking for bad stuff and figuring out what malware did. It’s what I wanted to be when I grew up if I couldn’t be on the SWAT team, though, so I’m pretty happy.

I also do a lot of this:

I study three martial arts on a (very) dedicated basis and attend seminars as often as I can to gain exposure to other weapons and styles. I also teach firearms classes and enjoy some friendly pistol marksmanship competitions.

The rest of my not so exorbitant free time is spent going to infosec meetups, gaming, reading, meditating, and watching science fiction. I love going to science fiction conventions, and still enter costume competitions with my best friend. Last year I spent 6 hours airbrushing her grey.

I have lots of good friends who also do this:

OK, it’s really more like:

Which is still pretty damn cool.

A whole boatload of people follow me on here: . I’m not exactly sure why, but I’m pretty sure it’s for my highly serious commentary on the current state of cybersecurity affairs.

So why am I blogging?

When I originally wanted to get into computer forensics, I called something like 30 police departments and colleges for advice, but nobody had heard of the field yet. Still others demanded I have exposure to highly specialized and expensive tools to gain an entry level job. It took years of hard work and a great network of friends in security for me to finally make it into the career I love. On the way, I found I’m pretty good at the sister field, Incident Response, which means organizing the efforts out how computer and computer networks were hacked, what was taken, and how to stop it from happening again. You’ll often see the fields combined and abbreviated as DFIR: Digital Forensics and Incident Response.

Anyway, my problematic experience breaking into infosec means that I always try to go out of my way to help people who are new to the field or interested in learning more about security. I speak regularly and infosec and non infosec conventions about hacking. I write security basics blogs and ebooks which are posted by my employer, as well as helping students interview for their first jobs in the field when I can. I am hoping the blog becomes a resource for more advanced infosec students and professionals who are trying to learn more about DFIR and how to implement associated programs.

I do hope you enjoy my blog and please feel free to let me know what you’d like me to discuss or assist with.

– Lesley