The Power of Mind Over Matter with Jessica Hyde

This is Trust Me I'm Certified, brought to you by GX Certifications, a podcast exploring how to conquer an imposter syndrome. Welcome back to Trust Me I'm Certified, I'm Jason Nicola, and our guest this episode is Jessica Hyde. She's now one of the leading experts in digital forensics as a director and magnet forensics and adjunct professor at George Mason University. She's hard to miss in the default world as a frequent speaker, sans-deaf or summit advisory board member, among many, many other contributions to the different community. How she ended up here though is just such an interesting and inspiring story. Probably one of my favorites that we've learned about here on the show, and what I love about it is that Jessica has been on a mission for the better part of two decades, one that has not only seen her transform herself in the notion of the power she has in the world, but also has seen her become very outward facing it, continually leveraging her skills to battle for the greater good. This was a really compelling conversation, and I feel like Jessica's basically one of my heroes now. There's so much great stuff here and I hope you all leave the conversation with a jolt of inspiration to go out in the world and find your own sense of mission and purpose and infuse that in your career where you can. So here it is, enjoy. All right, Jessica Hyde, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you so much for having me, Jason. So your exposure to engineering came in the Marine Corps, right? Yes, and no, so for the Marine Corps, I had really no idea what I wanted to do, and Marine Corps take the ASVAB and they said, "Hey, engineering is good." So I started doing electronic analysis of aircraft, it became an avionicsman, much similar to Leslie Carhartt, I actually think it's funny that the two digital forensics examiners that you've had on the show both happened to be aviation electricians in the military before going into D.F.I.R., which is really interesting. And another forensicator, I know Eric Copano, who's a sands instructor, also happens to have taken this bizarre path of working in avionics and then winding up in digital forensics, which are a skew fields. Maybe we found something here. Maybe we found something, maybe we need to recruit incident responders from avionics out of the military. Right. But yeah, so that made me realize that I actually liked circuitry and electronics and some exposure to DCAC theory. And so yeah, and then I started trying to go to school while being on active duty and getting electronics engineering degree. So that was, and then I think I started doing real engineering after that, as I started doing reverse engineering in a lab, whereas reverse engineering IEDs. So that's when I actually started doing engineering as opposed to just troubleshooting and analysis. So before that, were you into technology as a kid? Did you build things, break things? What were you doing? Yeah, as a kid. So I mean, when I was young, I was very lucky that I had an uncle who had a Commodore 64. And he used to babysit me, it was my only exposure to electronics. I didn't grow up with much means. And he brought over the C64 and plugged it into our TV set. And at about four, I wrote my first program, which was really, really simple. I was to take phone numbers and show all the alpha numeric constructs that they could be with those seven numbers. And I can tell you, my first phone number was She Pest, S-H-E-P-E-S-T, 7-4-3-7-3-7-8. And I know that because of that. And so I became obsessed with patterns and how things can be encoded and decoded. And so that was my first exposure. But to be honest, I didn't have technology in the home. And I didn't have-- I had some exposure at school, but not really great until I got to high school and was able to take programming classes and robotics classes. But then I really left that all behind. When I graduated, I'll be clear first. I actually, in my high school, dropout, who now teaches grad school, and has a graduate degree. But that shows it doesn't matter where you came from. But I went into retail management until September 11. So I really was not touching technology outside of operating a point of sale system, which is we are done when you investigate them. But I was a retail manager for years before September 11. And then I went in the Marine Corps. And the Marine Corps was like, hey, you're good with this stuff because of the ASVAB. You're good at electronics. And we're going to send you to avionics school. So it was almost like it reignited something I forgot I lost. I didn't remember how much I loved solving problems, decoding things, troubleshooting, trying to understand things and how they work. And it really reignited that passion that I had had as a young child, but it was stifled because it wasn't as common in society. It wasn't as prevalent. I will say I did some phone freaking, but that was more because I had a boyfriend in another state, and I want to make long distance calls. So I did, and I was a minor and there may have been some things, I figured out the algorithm for calling cards, but that's okay because I had a reason to, but that was my youth and that was all very different, reformed much, much so. Use your powers for good. I thought it was good. I thought I was making good long distance calls to my boyfriend, but from cell phones. And by the way, I learned also how you get caught, because if I happen to have been generating calling cards, I can't believe I'm talking about this, calling card numbers that actually work and using them, I always use them from payphones to call payphones. And then one day, I was stupid and I called my boyfriend at that time at his house instead of at a payphone, and the phone company took note and was able to figure it out, and he gave me up. So at the end of the relationship, yeah, you can say that, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't dime somebody out for, yeah, but I, I mean, I used to have a little, you know, tone emulator and the whole paperclip trick and all of that stuff back in the day, I'm definitely dating myself by the fact that, and so the irony is that what I've primarily worked in is mobile forensics. So definitely some irony in both my first coding project that I actually have never really related this myself, being translating phone numbers into words, very apropos, I guess, to what I wound up doing later in life that I never expected I would do, and then getting in trouble for doing a little bit of phone freaking and calling card generation back when that was the thing to now reversing Android apps, right, that's a completely, I didn't, I never put it together. So thank you Jason for bringing that up. Well, there was, there was so much there that we should dig into, but where you went with it was exactly where I was going to go is it's like, it's so interesting to me how in the moment and looking ahead, it doesn't seem like there's any connection between these things, and you don't see like, I'm a 40 year old that is encoding and decoding my phone number on a Commodore 64, like in a really good way, but that's kind of weird. I don't think that's, I don't think that's common, right? So, you know, I'm sure there are some tellings of your background when it's like, yeah, I joined the Marine Corps and as exposed to engineering and I got out and started doing some reversing, but really, there's a lot more to it than that, especially as you start to connect in the phone freaking and it's really cool to look back and identify the things that you didn't know were there and then kind of piece them together and go, hmm, maybe, maybe this was going to happen. You know, maybe this maybe I ended up doing what I was supposed to be doing, you know, right? And you know, I never thought of those things as being part of my story of how I got here. So, so thank you for, for eliciting that out of me. I had, I had no idea it existed. Thanks for telling it. Yeah. Kind of, kind of any connections to five. So, I kind of encourage anyone who's listening us to link back now to the things you did as a kid and how do you, they relate even if you don't think they did, right? Yeah. Like, I was prepared to ask some really general questions about like, hey, did you like doing puzzles and did you like figuring stuff out and it's like, yeah, I was, you know, encoding and decoding my phone number and phone freaking and it's like, okay, yeah, this all makes perfect sense. It does. And if you think about it, that's all about figuring out how things work and then how do I use that in the technological means? For sure. Yeah. Only now using powers for good. Right. Definitely. Definitely. So, another thing you mentioned is working in retail, well, dropping out of high school, working in retail and then September 11th happened and I don't want to, I'm assuming that, that was what's, you know, spread 100, 100 percent. I was on parasol and October 28, 2001. Okay. Right. Why was that important to you to do? I mean, for the obvious reason, so people, I know, I mean, my dad worked right there and he was missing at the time I enlisted. I didn't, my dad thankfully was okay. He just kind of shut down after seeing what he saw. But the, I, I knew people. We all lost people. I lived in New Jersey. I saw the towers fall with my own two eyes. We, I was working retail at the time. I was a store manager of the Abercrombie and Finch and the Livingston Mall, New Jersey. And immediately we, after the second plane hit, we basically closed everything in New Jersey that was a possible target and being a mall was immediately closed. And I drove home and at the time, I lived in town called Hawthorne. And my apartment happened to be like my neighborhood was on a hill. And because of that, from my living room window, you could see the towers. I saw my own two eyes and I, I realized at that moment, and I'm sure you can hear those in my voice, but then I had to do something more important with my life that it wasn't about just getting by and seeing my friends and doing, doing the things I enjoyed at that point that, that I needed to use my skills and my brain and my body and my all to do something that mattered. And I spoke to a recruiter, God and education waiver, because I scored high enough on the ASVAB or the pre-ASVAB, but first you take a pre-test and they wouldn't have even spoken to me. I scored enough on the ASVAB for them to let me in with a GED. I believe in 2001, don't quote me on this, that my recruiter told me, so who knows how true it is that there were only three education waivers that year, and I was one of three. It did help that it was a female, there are higher, there are quotas to get enough females to run the actual platoons at Blue Camp. And so went, went into the Marine Corps and it's the smartest, best decision I made. A lot of people felt it was a bad reaction to grief. And September 10th, one of my roommates died of a heart attack, completely unassociated. The events of September 11th, and I had lost an infant brother that year at five days. My friends, that had betting pools that I would not make it through Blue Camp. And I was the kind of person who always did something that was unexpected and the most unexpected thing I could do was to complete it and do it. And so I did. And it's all mind over matter, right? I mean, so at the time I was four foot 11, I was probably a hundred pounds soaking with. I was not normally what people think of when they think of a Marine. But being a Marine, it's not your physique. That all can be built. It's your mind. And the thing we used to say is mind over matter, if you don't mind, it doesn't matter. Right. And that's like something something I live with every day and it made me who I am. If it wasn't for the Marine Corps, I would have not gone to college. I wouldn't have earned a degree in electronics engineering and a master at some computer forensics. The Marine Corps basically paid for that. I used my GI bill and I went to school while in active duty. I wouldn't have met my spouse who happens to be a pentester now, but we were both avionics meant together in the Marine Corps. So maybe this again goes to this point of being in avionics and then winding up an infosat. I wouldn't have had my children. I wouldn't have been exposed to the things I was exposed to. I wouldn't have most of the relationships I have. I wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn that I love electronics and to be re-instigated with that. The Marine Corps gave me everything. The Jessica you talked to today wasn't born in Orange New Jersey, the Jessica you speak to today was born in Paris Island, South Carolina. That's powerful, that's succinct, that's important. Yeah. Yeah. So the worst day of my life gave me the greatest thing in my life. And if anything beats a terrorist, it's that. And I mean, I'm fortunate enough that when I left the Marine Corps, I continued that mission in reverse engineering IDs and going and working in counterterrorism labs, doing forensics. And now I build tools to help other people do that. And at the end of the day, what I get is I get that sense of mission and I know I'm doing something with my life. You took the words right out of my mouth because the thing that I find among people who are, well, many people who are successful companies that do really well and just people you want to be around and respect, they have some kind of a sense of mission. It's not just I'm going to go do this because the money's great or because this is the next thing that's up, it's about, no, I want to help move people out of poverty or I want to try to translate more opportunities to people who don't have them or I don't want to let the bad guys win. Whatever it might be, I think it's really, really important to find that mission and it lend so much context to the real grind of what you have to do, especially in this industry. And with a lot of the things that you've been doing throughout your career, so yeah, that mission is important. And I think it's 100% that right because mission gives you drive, mission gives you passion. And I don't see how anyone working in DFIR or even in broader infosac cannot have that sense of knowing that what you do matters is a great quote from Ronald Reagan that says some people wonder their whole life, if they've made a difference, Marines don't have that problem. And I feel like that equally applies to digital forensics, incident response, and infosec overall. We are fighting the digital fight. And that's the fight of today, look, look at the world right now. Sure. So post military, post military, did you know exactly what you wanted to do when you left the military and what was that process like to translate to a professional career? No, it's just like most people who wind up in this field, they had no idea where they wanted to be. Right. I wish I could say, oh, you know, I fell in love with hearing stories about forensic cases and solving them. And I decided I was going to be a forensicator and I went to school for forensics and I wish I had that story because wow, that shows just something that's innate that you know that you love. Right. Well, I had an engineering degree, I had a clearance, I applied for some jobs. I had been in, I was in northern Virginia outside the DC metro area mainly because my husbands work had brought them there after he left the military. We got together after he left the military. He continued in avionics, got it a networking degree, I got an engineering degree in them. We wound up at one point in our life as both being directors of forensics at the same time. It's very, very weird because completely different paths after we left the same thing. But so his job had brought him to DC and so obviously I went there as well. So I was still on active duty, he was in DC, I was in Norfolk. We were traveling and then we had two small children, I was in, he was doing like the four day a week driving down the Norfolk for three days, it's like a three hour drive. And so that was our life, I was going to school and on active duty, the whole spiel with two small children. And so eventually, when I got out, went up to northern Virginia, had to immediately find work. I stumbled across this position that I interviewed for a couple of positions, somewhere working for companies that were doing manufacturing of chips, somewhere, right? So I had this electronics engineering degree, I wanted to do something in electronics, it's where I spent the last six years of my life in the Marine Corps. And there was, I went on this interview for this contracting job for the government that did not disclose what the work was because you don't put, we reverse engineer IEDs on the job posting. I haven't seen that on credit. Yeah, it was just an electronics engineering position. It was in the same town where our, the townhouse we were renting happened to be. And it was like three miles from my house, so I applied to it, I went into the interview. And I remember feeling like I was taking an oral final for my digital fundamentals course in college. And it was hard. And then they had me write a description of a stapler. They're like, give the physical and do this whole description because they want to test my writing, which by the way, it's like the most important thing that a forensicator needs to know how to do, it's how to write a report. And I'm guessing, well, actually, I know I worked there for three years and they fly out told me the reason they did that was they would hire all these good engineers. And then find out they couldn't report on their findings. And if you can't report on your findings, your work is nothing, right? That's the, that's the outcome, that's our product is reports for you, right? So I had to write about the functional and physical descriptions of a stapler, one paragraph on each. And I thought it was the worst interview I ever did in my life because it was just so, there was no, we want to know who you are if you're a good fit for the company or whatever. And I had no idea what they did because it was such an obscure posting. And so then when they, when they contacted me about the job, I'm like, yeah, what is this? And they're like, oh, well, now we can tell you what we do. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, and I got some offers and I was like, well, this definitely sounds the most interesting. And this is the thing where I can still give back to my brothers and sisters who are getting KIA and hurt in the field by trying to find out who did this, so that we can stop the next IED from going off, right? That's the entire mission there. And, and it was freaking fantabulous and phones are used in IEDs and that's literally how I got into mobile forensics. But I started the exact backwards way because everything I got was post blast, right? So I had to figure out the schematic of how this was used as an IED and then figure out how to get data off of, and this is pre-smart phones, off of a phone that's BTS. It was literally a low note, yeah. Yeah. Right? Low note, F up. So. And, and yeah, and how to get data off of those, which meant everything was at the hardware level. Everything was extracting at the hardware level and figuring out the data storage. And I couldn't plug it into a cell, right, I've had a cell, right? But that then, that wasn't useful. Right. I mean, it could be once you had the data extraction and you had a full physical and you ran some parsers against it. But for the most part, that wasn't where the work was started or what the intense work was, if that makes sense. So I always like to imagine like a rocky training montage for people working in technology. Is that where it happened for you? Was it strictly day job stuff because, you know, you were coming out of the military. You had gotten your degree, you had some kids at home, your husband's a busy guy. You get this job and it's interesting to you and you get to use a lot of the skills you had, but it wasn't very neatly exactly what you had been doing. No, it wasn't. How do you fill in the skills? Yeah. It wasn't at all. And that's exactly it. I realized that I had skill gaps, especially when it was like, how do we get the data off the phone? Well, I got a little GI Bill money left. I'm going to, after work, go and work on my MS and computer forensics. So I started simultaneously while working in a lab, working on my masters and computer forensics to start filling in the gaps. And my lab originally didn't do the forensic analysis of the data off the devices. We were actually originally just strictly positioned at doing that, but that's what I thought was interesting. So I went and studied it. And then I brought that back to my lab and my lab scaled up and started doing that work and actually took that work from another lab that was supposed to be doing it originally. And so, and now that lab still does that work. And so, you know, started looking at the hard drives, started looking at the phones, started. The actual data that was recovered after we did the hard data recovery, which was more where we were focused was schematic development, data recovery, microcontroller reverse assembly. I did a lot of microcontroller code reversing, which is weird because most people, when they learn to reverse, I don't think that they're in assembly. It was all push pop move for me when I went to reverse. So I actually, and better, more comfortable in assembly for reversing than how your languages, but that's neither here nor there. But it's just because it's where I spent years of time working, and that's what makes a difference. So, to be honest, I think it's what's neat is because I think if you have a varied past, you bring different elements and different thought processes to what you do. To be honest, I still use skills that I use to repair jets when I'm doing analysis of IoT devices, right? I shoot wires or the board to find my grounds to find my RXTX and those are just such basis, basic things to me. I'm not afraid to pull out the soldering iron, right? I've done silver solder on a ladder in high winds during a snow storm before. In obscure situations, I've sold, and I'm upside down with a soldering iron with silver solder, which has a higher melting point. So, soldering on a board is not a big deal, right? It used to be an IPC trainer, right, could 77, 11, 77, 21, where I would teach soldering as part of my function in that lab. But no, you're right. It's the outside, right? And outside, I got the degree, and I studied. And then I became obsessive that my free time can always be used to make me better, right? Like, how can I get better and learn more? So I was trying to fill in those gaps. So I learned those gaps, and then I brought those gaps to my job. And so that's really interesting. And then in the montage that you were describing, I identified another gap, which was, I wasn't well-rounded. I was very specific into mobile, I was very specific into forensics, I was very heavy engineering, but now I've gotten this exposure to the broader computer forensics through the master's program at George Mason, where I later started teaching, but so I decided to leave that role to broaden myself and took an incident response job at EY, a consultancy, where then I was able to instead focus more on IR, intrusion, HR violations, and much more heavily on the computer and network side, which is where I was weak. And I needed that, I needed that exposure, because that makes sense. So like, I needed to, to round myself that way, and that has immensely helped my career now. For sure. Because, you know, I worked with agencies like ATF, who was my liaison when I was in the reverse engineering lab, and with agents, and did things that were both Intel and law enforcement based cases. And then I went out and did corporate incident response and HR investigations and user investigations that were on computer and network base. And then I went back into a mobile forensics lab in government. And so I think that it, the identification that I needed to broaden and widen my skills and taking that step to do it was something that I think really helped me. I think we need to put ourselves outside of our comfort zones. You were kind of saying, like, how do you shape a career? And I think that that's really part of it is recognizing when you have skill deficits that you're not going to achieve in your current place. If you can achieve them in your current place, do it. Like, my current role, I can, I luckily have enough flexibility to grow and garner any way that I feel that I need to, and I can express those things and grow and garner in different ways. But I didn't necessarily have that in a lab with such a specific mission. So I went to some place that had a broader and different mission and that the education and training still was necessary and then was able to grow different ways. So I highly advise getting out of your comfort zone and regardless of how you do that. You said something that was really interesting about how even today you still reference back to and benefit from your avionics experience. Absolutely. Do you think that you still benefit from your retail experience? We had Lodrina turn up. We recorded it recently and she had a similar experience in, you know, about communication and being customer-facing and distilling your message and things like that. Yes, this is incredible. Most important skills to being able to be outside of the lab to talk to customers, to relate things. I mean, I've briefed generals of foreign countries, I've briefed dignitaries, but I also have spoken to customers at organizations and having good customer face and that skill is actually incredible. And I absolutely learned that. I also learned a lot about leadership, believe it or not, in retail before even going to the Marine Corps because I was leading teams of people who had varying interests. A lot of part-timers this wasn't their primary function and how do you lead and motivate people who aren't doing this because they want to who are not passionate about what they're doing. Right. And finding ways to lead and motivate. Like, I remember doing really silly things like having, you know, running my own contest not just about sales, but about interactions and, you know, putting jelly beans and jars and having people guess whose jar was who, not knowing that I was doing things off of metrics and they didn't know which jar was theirs, it was getting filled and it was a race to the top, but they didn't know which jar they had. And then they actually got to guess which jar they had and people learned more about themselves. Right. And I learned a lot about time management, about scheduling, about lots of these interesting little nuance things that you don't necessarily go, oh, that's technically related, but most of my soft skills actually came from that experience of being in retail and being a retail manager. And this is why I advocate to teams that it is incredibly, incredibly important to have career switchers on your team. Your whole team doesn't need to be people who have done lateral moves. But having that perspective is going to help you understand and you brought up something else here. Maybe LaDrina did and I haven't obviously seen it because it hasn't aired yet, but everybody else probably will have is that when you learn how to relate to people of diverse backgrounds who you've never met before. So it helps with that pitch and being able to understand because again, you're talking to people on their worst day when you're doing forensics or you're talking to people who are investigating the worst day. And in doing that, you need good communication skills and you also need to make things relatable to people. You need to very quickly find ways to connect with people so that they have trust in what you're saying and they want to listen. And they're going to take your advice for what it's worth and feel that you're advising them truly as you feel and you're showing that on a state. And that's connection you have to make with people. For sure. Yeah, and it's also not their fault that they're not a forensic expert. Absolutely. So this is, you know, I was actually having this discussion yesterday with somebody and I said one of the most amazing, actually I was talking to Matthew Mitchell who's going to be giving the keynote at the Sandsky for Summit. He will have done this by the time anyone sees the recording and he is in a hacking for good world and he's amazing, one of my favorite, I have so many favorite people but he's definitely in my favorite people list and he's incredible runs crypto, Harlem does all these amazing things for good and we were having a discussion a little bit about what forensicators are like and I said, you know what, what skill every good forensicator has, every good forensicator can give great analogies because they have to be able to develop very technical research and very technical findings to and I don't care if you're in academia or and you're giving a presentation or if you're in law enforcement or you're an incident response and advising sysos and CEOs, you need to be able to take very technical concepts and make them relatable and understandable. Right. And so we all have this amazing skill that's not tapped into that is a hard skill for people to develop but you get it from going through to trenches and having to learn how to brief people. For sure. So forensics in general and especially a lot of the hardware stuff that you've talked about and that you've done in your career is very intimidating for most people. It's intimidating for me. What made you think that you could do this stuff? So to be honest, I'm the kind of person who goes, you don't know what you can do until you do it. Right. Right. You don't know if you can learn a foreign language. You don't know if you can play a musical instrument. You don't know if you can dance. I joined the Marine Corps not knowing how to swim. That is a pretty bold freaking thing to do. Like I said, I grew up with no means. I never had access to a pool. I didn't know how to swim. We played in the Fire Master when I was off. So when I went into the Marine Corps, I knew darn well that I was going to have to pass swim qual. But I had faith and confidence in the fact that they knew how to train me and that by the end of the day that I would figure it out as long as I could do what I was told, I can follow instructions, I can pay attention, I can study hard and I can work hard. So I might not get a day one out the gate, but I am going to tell you I am going to learn it by the end of the day I was jumping off the 20 foot platform and full gear and doing that swim across the pool. And I did not know how to swim. I walked in the pool. They told me to swim across and I went to the bottom. They pulled me out. They told me what to do. And I stepped by step learned and that's how you approach anything. So if I could join the Marine Corps not knowing how to swim and pass swim qual on the first day, some people passed it by the end of the week, but everyone passed. You can do it. It is going to take you a different journey. It's going to take you a different amount of time, but you can do it. So with anything, I say, I don't know how good I'm going to be at this. But if I put enough in, I'll be able to pass. And that's the way it is, right? Like a Sam's course is like drinking from a fire hydrant, even when you know the content. Right. Yeah, it is. And drink from that fire hydrant and then study and work at it and you'll get there. And that's that's what it's about. And then I guess even the more important part is the harder part isn't I don't think the harder part for people is trying something. I think the harder part for people is saying, I know enough to share with others what I learned. Right. And that's actually the more important part people need to do. Totally agree. Yeah, it's unfortunate because it's one of the most critical parts of the learning process is being able to, like you said earlier, distill down what you know in a way that lands with other people. And that is really difficult to do if you don't know what you're talking about. But here's the deal, you do know what you're talking about. At every stage that you are, there is somebody who's not yet to that stage. Right. So even if you started your journey yesterday, you have background and experience in what you're seeing and the way that you're interpreting and understanding the information you're learning. And by sharing your interpretations, you help others on that same journey, because there's always somebody, when you first start out, there's always somebody a day behind you. And then when you, when you move out past that starting, you are in possibly parallel lines to other people where they have not necessarily had the same exact experience background, et cetera. And so your interpretations and your, the way that you make that content relevant and the way that you then learn things or find things or discover things, it's going to be different than the other person. Sure. You do have something to share. And it's hard to express that to people and people are so afraid of what other people might think. Right. And I'm going to tell you something about the deeper community. We want you to share because none of us can do any of this on our own. There are people who are the fathers of the field, the Brian Carriers, the Warren Cruises, the Eugene Spatferts, who, the Owen Casey's, who were putting out content and doing things that everybody else has built on. But since that time, we're all building on each other and together. So build on somebody else's work or share what you're doing so other people can build on yours. As long as you have things peer reviewed, it's fine. Peer review. Talk to somebody else at your level. I mean, I've never worked in a lab where we didn't peer review our reports by other people. I would hope to never work in a lab where we don't peer review each other's work. Peer review is critical not only to the academic process, but to things that are going to court, which by definition forensic content has the possibility of going to court. Peer review, peer review, peer review, to that also with what you're sharing. Peer review is excellent and that gives you the confidence and put it out there. You have something to share, put it out there. And it's hard because you do need that fundamentals before you can share. And so you do need to get those fundamentals. And then you need to really have that integrity of having done the work. Right. So you've got training and then you've got work and then you're ready to share, but you need to do it. Like as soon as it's ready, just get over it. Just do it. People who have limitations, because of where they work, especially when we're talking about digital forensics, law enforcement, government, et cetera. I'm not saying you have to share publicly, I'm not not sharing you, I have to share with reference to where you work and who your employer is, you may be able to share anonymously. You may be able to share without attribution to your employer, but still stating your name. Or you may be able to share just within your community. I work jobs where I cannot be public whatsoever. And I shared within my organization and then nature that content that's shared with other government organizations, and that is critical. So don't be afraid to do it. And that's a really hard thing to say, because I know it's the hardest thing to get over. Right. And we all have demons. And we all, imposter syndrome is real. And you know, what we need to do is we all need to name our demon and tell it to be quiet. I like it. So that's such a great perspective, and you're right, the deeper community and lots of other communities in FOSEC are just really great and really welcoming. Did you naturally gravitate towards sharing and being a part of these communities and you've been published a bunch of times and you've done a lot of speaking and you're on summit committees for SANS and you've done so many things. Was that natural for you or was it kind of an area of growth? No, it's an area of growth. And I'm going to tell you something, is somebody who gives talks all the time, right? I spoke in NCCC yesterday, speaking at the D for Summit tomorrow, I'm on the advisory and on the organizing committee for GFRWS next week. I get butterflies every single time. My hands get sweaty the whole night, right? There are things I haven't done yet that I struggle with and that I intentionally try to put myself out there. But when you finish it, the feeling when you've done that work. So here's a deal. You do all this work and all this research and figure out this new stuff, right? What is it if you don't share it? What good does it do anyone else or the community if you don't share it? If you share it, you help another case get solved quicker and it wasn't natural. But I used to work a case at a time and that's the way most forensics examiners work and you have impact on that case. And that can be the most important case in the world or it can be a very, very small case within your organization that nobody knows about. No matter what, you have an impact on your case. What if you can take that impact you had on your case from the knowledge and insights and work you did on that case and make it apply to hundreds of thousands of cases all over the world? You can multiply your impact. That's why you share. You help other people get to that answer quicker so that they can solve the next problem and then they can share what they found in that problem that helps you get to your answer quicker. And if we don't do that, we'll never, ever, ever be able to keep up. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of applications are out there. The tools support hundreds. The number of differences between versions of windows and versions of Mac and versions of applications and versions, we can never, ever know it all. There will never be a reference book or material or internet source that has it all. The only way we can create that body of work is if we do it together and share. It's obviously something I'm a little bit passionate about. A little bit. Yeah. A little bit so. That's good advice though. So it's difficult and it gets easier. I think the first few times you do it, you imagine that there are all of these evil people in the crowd and, you know, you get over it. They're not there. And out that most people want you to succeed and want to support you. And every once in a while, you get someone who's a little bit of a jerk, but they're much fewer and farther between than it seems like ahead of time. So, you know, I've put out a lot of content and I've done it everything from written content and peer-reviewed journals to blog posts, to speaking, and you're always worried about that naysayer. You know, they do exist, but it is such a small quantity. Sure. It is such a small percentage of the humans that you are going to reach and what they say doesn't matter. Now, one of the other things that you can do is get a good network of people behind you, talk and meet other people in your field, talk to those people who's work you admire, talk to your peers, get them to see what you're doing, get thereby in it, will help your confidence and guess what? If you have a strong enough network, they're going to help promote your work and that's going to elevate it. And even more importantly, if you share your work, like Jason, you know what to talk to me about today because you've seen things that I've put out there. If you share your work, when you go in for that interview on the next job, they're not going to ask you about things you don't know, they're going to ask you about your own work. Right. That's right. You're going to have that resume built. People are going to know who you are, people are going to be able to check you out beforehand and I will tell you, people who share get hired more. They get the jobs they want, especially if you're in a sock today and your goal is to get into the FIR, which that sometimes happens or sometimes people who are working in security operating centers, who that was their foot in the door and infosec, but they want to be in digital forensics, do research and put it out there. That is the best way in my opinion, share with the community, it helps the community, but it also helps you. That's great advice. You're amazing and I think throughout the course of this conversation, you've become my idol. Thank you so much for joining us, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much Jason for having me, this has been awesome. Thank you for helping me realize some insights that I never thought of and you're so awesome, this has been an honor. Thanks. That was Jessica Hyde, many thanks to her for joining us, sharing her background and all of the great advice that she offered here on the show. Thanks all of you as well for joining us for another episode of Trust Me I'm Certified. We'll be back in two weeks with Jose Verriantos, a super talented pentester, who almost didn't get a start in the industry until he took his fate and his own hands and refused to take no for an answer, so be sure to check that out. Also don't forget to subscribe to the show at gact.org/podcast and wherever else you listen to get updates about new episodes as they're released. Thanks again and we'll see you in two weeks.