 I'm Joshua James with D First Science. We have Andrew Lister with the Teego Global and I'm really excited to talk to him today specifically about his career path and how he actually got into forensics and what he's working on now. So yeah, no, great. Thanks, Joshua. And as I mentioned, my name's Andy. I have a background in the military here in the UK and joined the Wolverine Commandos at 18 and graduated through to our reconnaissance, junior commanders, senior commanders and then graduated up from Black to our special forces selection for SAS, SBS. I guess how long, talked about your military experience. How long were you in the military and what kinds of work did you do specifically in the military? What kinds of work did you do related to forensics, let's say, through the military? But I think now it's the modern world, you know, gone are the days of the regular soldiers and even the special operations teams like the teams I was running with, not having some kind of digital capability, the ability to push forward and extract data and intelligence and indeed in a lot of cases, evidence from the devices you find, you know. And it used to be we'd go into new sort of special operations units that maybe aren't as far forward as luckily some of the key Western groups that we'd work with and instantly, you know, they've got a million skill sets already and they're asking questions or why do I need to do this digital side? And you go, well, you consider yourself a professional operator in this damn world. Is there any way you've deployed in the world where you do not come across computers, phones, thumbsticks, MacBooks, hard drives? And what do you do? Do you ignore them? Do you gather that really important quick J2 intelligence that is on target, on scene? Do you wait for it to go back to a lab to get lost in the melee or does that come forward? So all these things kind of evolved through the military. And I was lucky enough to hit the ground running coming from a reconnaissance troop and the Royal Marines and then into our special operations. And then four years in a cell that did the covert and over exploitation. So that's everything from the ability to be able to work with people that are giving us information, potentially force protection. So looking after our own staff, you maybe operate in a location where you're working away from everybody else and you have local nationals that are to some degree trusted but there's always an element of distrust there potentially. Can you quickly look across their digital devices just to see potentially is there, are they searching for a lot of the local terrorist organizations? Are they looking at information around your camp in more detail than they should be? So it's not always just what you think in regards to going out, facing down the enemy, quickly pulling data, getting the results back. It can quite often be just protecting yourselves as a small group. It can be on the covert side. So using tradecraft to enter hotels, houses, whatever it is in these permissive and non permissive environments really to gain that intelligence or evidence. So again, there is a big crossover now between what the military do in these certain circles and what the police do. So for that four year period, I ran a cell for the joint effects cell, the jet, or the exploitation side of it. That's MPE material, people and equipment exploitation. And that encompasses everything. So wet forensics, digital forensics, cyber, all these kind of pieces. The problem being, of course, military already have a million skill sets. It's not in most cases your day job. So you're then getting pushed in to go, okay, we need to give these guys, and in some cases, girls that go to some of these locations, the ability to do something that very quickly, very easily without that training burden. How do we do that? And the answer was go and get all the experts. So we went to GCHQ, we went to Cheltenham, we went to all the main agencies that do these kind of things, Scotland Yard, GCHQ, SO-15, which is the counter-terror police, all these different pieces. And we said, look, we know you've spent decades honing your skills, getting all this experience. And I know it's gonna be painful, but we need you just to give us the gold and nuggets right now, give us all the best pieces that you've learned to give us best effect forward. And that's where it started. So this all kind of started at that initial forward phase. Originally, it was bag and tag. So maybe some of you viewers are familiar with that old school going in, you may be on a location. There's a lot of digital evidence there, and it's getting swept in a bag. Those days in many ways have gone because the information you can gain rapidly in a lot of cases now is just so effective for us. Okay. Again, just because I think the military aspect is so different than maybe criminal or civil investigation, you mentioned a lot of different skills, you mentioned on scene or applying it to intelligence, counter-intelligence, local protection, all of these different things. Can you just break it down kind of as easy as possible? What would a relatively standard digital investigation for the military look like? It's a bag of dolly mixtures, and that's part of the magic really of the way that the military has grabbed the best of both. So it's gone to all these agencies and groups. It's gone to companies like ourselves and said, look, we can't individually learn these 10 tools to give us 100% of what we want. We don't have the time, the cognitive ability, we don't have the resources. Can you condense that and give us at least 80% of everything we require, but the training burden and skill fade is massively reduced. And clearly I now work for a commercial company. I use this technology damn range, not just at the frontline, but at a kind of fusion cell kind of sort of, that lab kind of effect. So a massive vested interest in making sure the technology does what it needs to do. Too many devices, too much data, not enough experts out there. So we're trying to bring something to the table that can assist that. In regards to a standard military, it depends on the group. So you might have more elite troops who are going in and maybe let's theoretically use Ukraine at the moment. You know, some of the fighters there might have found an individual come across them. That individual has a mobile on them, has a thumbstick on them, has a camera from doing surveillance and has an SD card in that or a drug. At that point, at that instant, that intelligence is just mind-blowingly critical. How it would have been done 10 years ago is all that would get bagged up. It might even be left in some cases and then it would eventually get sent back. Somebody would go, what do we do with this? It goes off to one agency and passes it to another. They find some key critical data are awesome. Well done guys. But that gets lost in the Chinese whispers, the communication chain takes ages. So we're trying to work out organic ways that organizations could have the technology and skills up front, but still feed all of the greater agencies that are SMEs, subject matter experts, specifically in those fields. So you're managing to cover up both sides. So at that point, you might have someone going forward and pulling that critical data off a phone or a device lifetime at the front end. You might be on another job and we have for about four years held a contract with a discrete US agency. They have all their tradecraft weighed off. Everything is legal, covert method of entry, all these kinds of pieces against bad actors across the globe really. And they add the technology to that. So that's being able to extract data and using the technology skills blended with their tradecraft in order to leave everything in situ how it was. So it doesn't ever look touched from a physical point of view or from a data digital point of view, but still pulling back the critical information. So there is no standard. You can go down pretty much every kind of avenue. The critical thing is, and rest assured that the vast majority of organizations now are grabbing this. They're realizing that when I first came into this in the military, we were blessed in the organization as if you sat at the top of the tree and if you requested something, you generally got it. But even in that field now, you're finding there's so much stress on anything related to cyber and digital. It's massive. So organizations, three letter agencies, whatever it is that may be supported you regularly can't because they're in flux doing their primary task, even though yours is a high value target. And then you find, well, hang on, what do we need? Well, we need some answers ourselves. So again, going back to that, having an organic capability in a bag that can be usable for the operators. So if I can kind of summarize this, coming from the criminal investigation perspective, it almost sounds like you had support labs, they were taking a long time to process the data and this is critical intelligence that you're trying to process. So you might find something, let's say on scene or in the field, and then that would need to be sent back and processed by your lab, but then that can take too long because it's potentially actionable intelligence. What I would call first responders, 80%, 90% of the way, and then given them tools that way they can actually respond in the field and start to collect and analyze data immediately. Is that essentially what I'm hearing? Okay. Absolutely, but going a step further than that, we have it with what's called like, let's call it level one, two and three. Level one would be that first responder, that incident responder that goes there, be it police or be it military and whatever fashion it is, and this is where the technology blends. We're currently working with likes of Pop Atom in the home office here for police officers to do similar to what SF did in the SF Special Forces in the manner that I was just describing there, but into homes managing serious sexual offenders. So it might have been where an officer goes in to manage a previous serious sexual offender and thinks that investigating for 20 years, the hair on the back of the neck goes up, something is not right here, but I'm not a digital expert and I'm not seeing anything else. So I'll report back to the lab and I'll ask for justification to seize the 24 devices in the home. The lab is already backlog by six months, sadly, because it's just overwhelmed, which is a common piece across all the world. And the user, the frontline police officer, then can't really do anything at that point. So we've started now adding that triage, blending the best of both, the quick intelligence investigation piece, but making it evidential and having clear, easy steps, in some case, patented technology from us. For those officers to be able to do that, get quick identification, yes, there is a list of material. Great, well, not great clearly, but great in the sense that we can bring justice. They can then remove those devices to the lab for further exploitation. And again, we've had so many, we work with counter-terror borders, we work with a lot of the ICAT community, internet crimes against children, CSAM, and so on. And everybody's loved that frontline rapid response, adding common sense with great digital technology and the boffins that sit in the cave doing all the development, they are awesome. But putting all that together, they loved on that frontline. And then we started getting, maybe five years ago, a big ass to say, well, can't you do more on the lab side? Use the same ethos and mentality because the digital tide is against us. As we said, too many devices, too much data, not enough individuals being able to process this. Can you do these profiles? Can you do these? So we blended all that into the lab side and now we've got some exciting lab technology that basically enables you to put job cues of 2030, different digital, high-level forensic examination techniques in a row, press a button and the technology, the complex under the hood, but is relatively easy on the front side. We can't reach experience. It also frees up the examiner to do the, let's call it the more difficult stuff that you can't. I assume that the tools that you're talking about, I mean, all this development is actually taking place in DTGO. Is that correct? Yeah, I'm here with DTGO, but as DTGO, we play really good. We like to think we're the good player in the market. We play nice in the playpen with other technologies. We import many of our competitors into our technology so that if a user already has multiple different tools, they can utilize some of our analytics that maybe other tools don't have, they can do link analysis, all this great stuff. But of course, yeah, I mean, DTGO is pioneering the way for this, mainly because it's been lucky enough to have that blend of what I call the best of both. It's had the blue and it's had the black, it's had the police and it's had the special ops and it's kind of mashed them all together and taken the best bits from each, gone, what can we learn for the greater good of each of those groups? And as a fallout, that works for borders, it works for corporate and it just depends how you want to utilize the technology. Of course, there's multiple other tools out there. It's quite flattering, copying similar kind of methodologies and pieces from that and in the real world, of course, not one tool is gonna do everything for you clearly and those of you that are experienced out there know that those that you aren't, there's no sort of golden fleece that's gonna cure everything for you, but what it can do is a significant amount to get you a massive head start and of course that. I think the Americans actually taught me that. One is none and two is one. Okay. There's not the one limited choice, that's why. Can you expand? You've talked a little bit about the products now and how they apply to industry, but can you talk about your role in DTGO and specifically how your military experience transfers to a private company? You touched on it a little bit, I think, but as somebody in digital forensics, if they're starting from a military background, like where do they go? How did they actually transfer those skills to another part of digital forensics sector or maybe even another industry altogether? Yeah, I think I was specifically lucky really because the government spends millions on the special operators globally in all the different units, wherever they are. So you do kind of have a very different career path to other individuals when you come out and again, it just, the stars aligned. So I've been using the technology, I'd actually been probably a great pain in the obvious for DTGO, constantly hitting them up, asking for changes in technology, coming up with issues that we were finding forward. I keep my security clearances. So talking in semi-veiled speech to try and go, oh, if I had this kind of problem, could you solve it without giving the game away completely? And they were really good at it. So when I came out, I got approached, there was an individual working for a discrete government aid or previous government agency and then working for the company, approached me and said, would you like to join? And I came in under special projects and sales and then over time just built up the history in the company, helped with the development, helped intrinsically with the developers themselves, although I can't code all the way through to the trainers and then the market inside. And it just exploded from there really and then became the director for sales and about five months ago, the managing director and obviously we've just rebranded and stuff as we sort of push our team forward. And did you have to, I mean, did your military experience like let you, like did you already have kind of knowledge about how all those aspects of the job worked through the military or is this like constant learning? Like how did you get those skills to be able to do all of these different things? It's constant learning, but the key pieces with, and this is a difficult one, there's a big veteran push out there in the UK and of course in the US and globally in pieces like this. And one of the biggest barriers to that for some individuals is not understanding that correlation between what you do in the military versus how that comes across in the private sector. It is extremely similar, just change your words. So, you know, it's like changing your suit. You go from a green suit or a black suit jumping through windows out of planes, whatever it is to a shirt and tie or a polo top or whatever it happens to be. It's that same kind of piece. And the skills that our individuals have from the military, because we're talking specifically about the military here, it's the same with police and other agencies and industries that they can bring across with just their communication, friendships, being able to utilize, I mean, let's not forget, it's people, people are key. You know, if you have great developers, great market in, great trainers, great sales individuals, all these different pieces, they're gonna fall down if they work in their own compartmented areas and don't gel well. And there is this great bond and piece through the military that I do think comes across when we come into that private sector. And of course, you're very used to working with massive organizations with multiple sensitive kind of commercial and government relationships built into that. So, yeah, I think it's the best of both, to be honest. It would just be brilliant for any veterans out there. Just take a bit of time, find a mentor, sit with someone regardless of whether it's digital, forensic, cyber, whatever it is, find someone. Most people are willing to help a little bit and just get a bit of a teaching on how, change your mind or not always change your mind, but pull across to how is everything that I did on that military side transferable and where are the areas where it's not. That is also important as well. But it's been a great journey for me, so far, so great. Yeah, I mean, I think not just military, anyone looking to get into digital forensics or switch what they're doing should be looking to get a mentor anyway. So I think that's a really excellent point. You talked a little bit about branding and advertising and I noticed I checked your website this morning and I saw the new DTGO Global logo. Like usually whenever there's a logo update or the site looks different, there's some reason behind it. Is this just something you wanted to do? Is there a reason? What is that about? Can you tell us a little bit? I think DTGO has been around for well over a decade and producing cutting-edge technology and initially we were this boutique British company that was working in the sensitive gray areas with special operations and others. And that kind of worked for us as a group because back then this technology was much more kind of a hush-hush but now everybody knows there's abilities to break encryption or be it hard in some cases, there's abilities to scan devices, you can pull back deleted data, all these different things are known. So that's no longer regarded as sensitive, it's when you blend that with other pieces. So that's kind of where we ended up with DTGO coming across that, so yeah. You've been talking about tools a little bit and applications to different areas, especially military but what, I guess, what does DTGO working on? What can we expect from you guys this year or coming up in the future? 100%, I mean, along with the rebranding that we've just gone through, I mean, clearly that was driven by Bud and the marketing team so a big shout out to the team that have done a fantastic job because we have now pushed from, like I say, that discrete little bubble that we were into a global powerhouse, multi-million-pound contracts with government agencies but we're sticking with that ethos where if you are the single-loan investigator in the small little force that is out wherever and whatever police department, we are answering the phone, we are taking in your concerns and we are working on that as well. So the company is staying flexible, agile and really trying to do the right thing. If I'm honest, if you look across everything that DTGO does now, it's got things like offline translation, photo DNA, AI, object detection for weapons, cars, nudity, in decent images, you had a symbology, right-wing symbology, there's link analysis, super fast, rapid imaging, nearly all of those things have come from client requests as opposed to just organically driven by us as a company. So we are driving forward like that. What we have noticed is that there's a large need within the forensic commercial community for these kind of technologies that face the same problems the police and the military have. So we've started pushing a lot of our technology across to the civil and corporate investigators. Of course, there's still some covert and sensitive sides that are not required, but on top of that, we've got a case management system. So that's quite new and that's still evolving. So that, again, across police forces, lining up the management of your forensic incidents, your workflows, having all your exhibits tracked and other parts that come into your investigations, automatic alerts and to really streamline that. And in fact, police forces have had that for a long time in different ways. What we're trying to do is make it easier, more flexible and built into the kind of the TGO workflow, if you like, whereas the military haven't done that quite so much. So we're actually bringing that part of the technology across to the military from the law enforcement side, which is great. On top of that, we've got endpoint monitoring. So that can be from, again, a commercial point of view, wanting to make sure that you're employing the right people, that there's no commercial espionage going on, pieces like espionage, it's endpoint as a person, not endpoint as in like a networked server somewhere. Correct. Well, endpoint as in a digital device, but that enables you obviously to monitor individuals and also overtly or covertly. So including, we're trying to help other countries that maybe are not as far forward in digital forensics and areas like that. And sadly, in a lot of these countries and areas, there is a higher rate of corruption, et cetera. Probably an argumentative fact there. And so also some of the clients that we have in these regions want some kind of security around being able to monitor to some degree what they do. Of course, it's a choice and sensitive piece of technology just because of the way that it can obviously be utilized, even remote acquisition now. So we did a great demo around Sweden with Magnus of H2 Consulting. We've been working over there for maybe eight years. We've never lost a client, never lost a client. We've always expanded over there or they've renewed our technology, which is great. But we were able to access a computer back in the UK or remotely acquire that and bring the evidence over at lifetime whilst in a short live in-person demonstration. Was that for internal investigations you're talking or? It's like a lot of these things. It depends how people want to use the technology. This specific piece was for internal investing. You're in company, you put it out on your multiple machines that are spread across the globe and rather than traveling to do all those pieces or having to have individually trained experts in the regions, you can remote in and do hopefully the vast majority of what you need to do without the need to physically take that time to go there. Okay, so you have basically a product suite for not only military law enforcement, but you're also expanding out to basically corporate investigations, internal audits, things like that. And then also bringing lessons learned from each of those back to, like you said, military. That's super interesting, okay. And then again, your experience in the military is going to inform a lot of that where I've been out in the field, I know what these guys are gonna need. That's great, okay, so we're kind of short on time. So I'm gonna ask another question specifically related to your work experience. What advice would you give students considering getting into information security and digital investigations? Well, I'd say round peg, round hole. So make sure is what you wanna be doing, make sure there's not been some weird veil pulled over your eyes that you're gonna be a jack power running around with something the size of a cigarette packet that can image. I don't know if they know, I don't know if students know what Jack Bauer is, so. Oh, am I that out of date and all? Well, let's go with James Bond, everybody knows James Bond, right? So I'd say just make sure that you know what it is you're getting into and that you definitely have, you've gotta love it, find the passion, not the job and the rest will come. And that's definitely what I found and within the military, and then sadly obviously got injured and lost my career there, but was blessed enough to fall into something that I've been doing for a couple of years and finding that the passion is still completely there. You know, I find it funny, eight years on in DiTigo and I'm away at some show like Techno Security and I'm talking to a police officer about their investigations and before you know it, 20 minutes has gone and I'm beaming and I'm talking about our patented technology and rapid imaging and they're like, wow, you still love this stuff. And I'm like, absolutely. The moment that goes, you've gotta start questioning everything. But going back to your other point, a mentor, having someone in there that can put an arm over you, direct you into a location, help you learn what you need to learn and just be a bit brave, reach out, you know, don't wait for it to come to you. Don't assume that you're not up to the task. Don't have that fear of failure or have it, but be brave, still step in, you know, imposter syndrome comes up a lot, I think for individuals getting there and get it cracked. The biggest thing I notice in my particular work environment that's changed over my tenure really is trying to help people with their initiative, trying to give them the tools to find the answers or at least when they hit a roadblock, not just sit there and go, oh yeah, I've hit a roadblock. Okay, maybe don't take the next step but think about it and come with a couple of colors courses of action for this is option one and two in my mind, what do you think? You know, and that makes such a huge difference in an organization. Digital or just commercial. Okay, so just to kind of summarize, first off, see if you love it, which kind of implies, you know, test out some things, see what's online, maybe look at the materials and if you're enjoying what you're studying, then keep with it, get a mentor and then that'll help you to actually find resources that you need and then get support in the direction to go. So we actually have a question from chat and it is, Andrew, do you ever get burned out from doing continuous learning and working with so many data tools, devices? If so, how do you deal with it? That is an awesome question. And yeah, so when we first started this in my last organization, so in the special operations, we had a couple of SMEs, the subject matter experts that were put in and you were put in and called a subject matter expert and you didn't have a clue what you were doing. You were then built up to be in that subject matter expert over a period of time and the first time we tried this, we did it the wrong way around. You've got, it's all a learning curve. So we went out and we got all the open source tools, we bought all the COTS tools, commercial off-the-shelf technology, we had access to all the government tools and we tried to learn them all, we tried to do it all and we became what's called combat effective, exactly as you were kind of asking there, cognitive overload, the ability for the organization to operate was just extremely limited. So we had to tune it down and go, okay, we want now just the best of three rather than having the technology there that lets just for the argument sake, say you could do 100% of everything, it's not possible for the human and for the organization to actually manage that because you'd have to know consistently how to use these 12, 15 tools. So what we wanted to do was take the mass amount of data and problems and solve those and then have a few specialists that could do the JTAB, the chip offer or the other like Mimusia kind of niche areas that everybody talks about and loves but actually really in most cases are a smaller part of your investigation overall is when you hit that wall and your biggest stream kind of pieces. In regards, so that helped us a lot with that kind of stress factors there. For me personally, yeah, it can be a problem but again, it's going back. We have a thing in the military where you go on an operational sort of ORM and it's like taking pots off the boil. So right now, if I'm super interested and I know there's a lot coming up that might be involved in one type of technology, you get yourself fully up to speed on that whilst keeping the others just on the bubble. So they're good. And all of a sudden, boom, something comes in on drones I would touch the drone in six months or great. Where's the manual? Where's the help videos? Where's those bits? Where's the SME? Can I quickly tap them up for a bit and pull that one back to the front? Get that one heated up and push it. And that's a military technique? It's probably across the board. It's not there. When you're hit with so many things, it's almost by default. You can't really do it many other ways because there's only so much you can do as any individual. We have a couple more questions. Andrew, do you have paid one-to-one coaching? I don't know what for, just coaching. Coaching is fantastic. So I have coaching, but generally the coaching is by my colleagues and friends. My partner actually, she works for the National Health Service as a learning development coach. So again, sometimes I do this all the time. I use people as a sort of like a checkerboard to go, am I miles off here? And that can even be in personal relationships with members of staff, obviously bearing in the sensitivities of things, but going, am I reading this completely wrong or am I wrong in doing this? Or how does this come across? Sometimes in those cases, I'll put stuff to the side and then go back to it, reread it and funnily enough, you look at it and go, yeah, no, that needs changing. So I was- I think they're asking for coaching from you, not whether you receive coaching. I'm afraid not. We as a company train and I am occasionally one of the trainers, depending on the style of opera or the style of the way our technology is going to be used. Now I keep all my clearances and stuff, but paid one-to-one, afraid not. It's just not enough hours in the day. I would love to, but I definitely feel like I can give you much more benefit helping my whole team work and giving them what they need to sort of take that forward. But we have all sorts of training courses from your basic digital forensics all the way through to and utilizing our patented technology and pieces like that, but thanks for the shout. That's really kind. We have one more question. So can you tell us how you started your way in forensic cybersecurity world? I think we kind of covered that with military, but is there any kind of last thing you'd like to say about going through the military first to begin in cybersecurity or digital forensics? Any final words for that? Lucky. Be lucky? Okay. It was awesome. I joined the round bowl round peg. So I joined the military because that's what I wanted to do and I loved it. I joined the Marines because I loved being in the UK, called the thinking soldier. It's the longest training in the Western world. I liked the reconnaissance aspect. So I went into that and then special forces and that just opens a whole plethora of different skill sets there with different agencies. So really lucky going that way. There are a lot of groups now within the military, the Royal Military Police or the military police in general are utilizing a lot of this kind of technology. The specific intelligence battalions are utilizing a lot of this technology, obviously special operations and pieces like that. So it is a great place to go in if you already love and want to do all those pieces. And once you've started that road, you can start veering off down these kind of speciality pieces, having a pension, having a great laugh, traveling the world. Obviously occasionally it has its downsides but that's the same with anything. Certainly in the world I've come from, it wasn't like a screamy, shouty kind of go do this, do that, very much a professional quiet operators way forward, which was just amazing. So really lucky and really blessed. Okay, great. So thank you so much. That's really all we have time for. Hi everyone. We have a quiz. Detigo kindly offered to provide some prizes. So if you fill out a little quiz about Detigo, about the tools and when you can use them in different forensic situations, then they will provide these prize packs. So that quiz is going to be open until this Friday. So if you're looking at it now, I will post the quiz link in the chat now. And Andrew, thank you so much for talking about us. It's super interesting hearing the military perspective and specifically how you got the skills in the military and how those are transferring over to the private sector. So really interesting. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us. Nah, thanks very much Jocelyn. Thanks very much for everyone out there. Yeah.