On Thursday 24 February 2022, Adam Shortall, Digital Forensic Analyst from the Digital Forensics Unit of Kent Police, delivered a guest talk for students of the module “Introduction to Digital Forensics”. This is a new module for the current academic year 2021-22 which is optional for the MSc Cyber Security and MSc Computer Science (Cyber Security) of the School of Computing, University of Kent.
Dr Virginia Franqueira, module convenor, said: ‘It was great to be able to give the opportunity for students to get insights about the daily work of a Digital Forensics (DF) laboratory, supported by Kent Police.’
Adam Shortall said: ‘It was great to have an opportunity to talk to students interested in Digital Forensics. The students were very engaged and asked some great questions. We look forward to working with you again!’
Many of our students enjoyed the guest lecture, and below are some quotations from them:
- ‘I really liked the transparency of what sort of actions the job role entails on a normal basis as it was nice to see the theory learned in my university course being reflected in real life such as the use of hashing. And how impactful UNIX regex functions like grep have been in cutting down evidence analysis tremendously, as hardware storage sizes grew exponentially.’
- ‘I found this talk captivating, as I identified a lot to Mr. Shortall’s career plan. It was very interesting to have a glimpse of a forensic analyst’s life and duties, both on the positive and negative parts. He showed a real habit in public speaking, with a great balance of humour, facts, and personal opinions.’
- ‘In particular, Adam Shortall was a very great speaker and had our attention throughout the session. He had anticipated our questions and incorporated them in his slides/discussions. It was also interesting to see, that despite the ‘dark’ nature of the work he was very upbeat and took delight in his work.’