Top 5 Computer Forensics Certifications

If someone set out deliberately to create an IT certification situation designed as a cautionary tale, that person would have to work long and hard to create a more ambiguous and challenging set of circumstances than those that face would-be credential holders in the area of computer forensics.

For even though there are numerous high-quality certification programs that take computer forensics and digital investigations as their focus, there are also a great many other programs and sponsors whose motives and programs are far less transparent, well-documented, and widely known.

This is one case where it helps to ask yourself: What could be muddying the waters for this subject matter? As you ponder away, consider these interesting contributory elements:

• In our down economy, computer crime is a major growth area. And as more such crimes get reported, more investigations are needed. So it’s good news for law enforcement and private investigators who specialize in computer forensics.
• Funding for anti-crime efforts is suffering less than other areas of public funding. Nearly every police department needs more trained computer forensics professionals, so there’s lots of demand for candidates with “suitable credentials.”
• IT professionals who want to work for the federal government, either as permanent employees or private contractors must now meet certain minimum training standards on information security. Computer forensics topics qualify as part of the mix needed to meet such requirements. This adds further to demand.

The result is a continuing explosion of companies that offer computer forensics training, many of which also branch into the credentialing arena, and decide to offer their own “private-label” certification credentials as well.

A recent survey we conducted for SearchSecurity.com (October 2010) on available information security certifications turned up no fewer than two dozen computer forensics and anti-hacking credentials. And those are all at least somewhat well-known, and all of them are completely on the up-and-up. But in pulling those materials together, we deliberately ignored numerous programs that didn’t publish the sizes of their certified populations (this often means that the population is small and provides no clear indicator for something that’s either just getting started or not doing very well; I generally look for programs with no fewer than 5,000 certified professionals, by contrast) or that are associated with mandatory high-dollar training (so there’s a strong profit or financial motive in signing people up for certification where thousands of dollars in training must be acquired en route to a credential).

How’s a curious IT professional supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff here? Some well-known certifications can help, so we provide pointers to our Top 5 in text and table form in the sections that follow. Some of them may be familiar, but there will be some surprises in our line-up, because computer forensics credentials remain something of a “wild frontier.” Read on, please, to learn more.

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems.

Mary Kyle is a full-time freelance writer, editor, and project manager based in Austin, TX. A former IBMer, Mary has over 10 years of project management experience in IT, software development and IT-related legal issues.

Check out Ed's Tom's IT Pro  Making It in IT - Certification & Training blog here. See here for all of Ed's Tom's IT Pro articles.