The Pitbull Mentality: Navigating Careers in Digital Forensics

During my internship at I-Force I had the chance to co-host a podcast episode together with fellow IT student Jesse Dumoulin. We sat down with four of the firm's digital forensics and incident response professionals, Pieter Van Der Hulst, Tjebbe Vanquickenborne, Borna Talebi and Lara Sezgin, to talk about what the work actually looks like from the inside, how each of them got there, and what they'd tell someone trying to break into the field today.

Listen to the episode

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What we covered

• Diverse paths into DFIR. The team comes from very different starting points, some from law, others from software engineering, and most didn't take a straight path into DFIR. That mix turns out to be a strength, because each person brings a different angle to the work.
• Practical education over pure theory. The conversation kept coming back to learning by doing: hands-on labs, real cases, and the hard truth that no class fully prepares you for live incident work.
• Certifications that matter. Specialised tracks like SANS and the matching GIAC certifications came up repeatedly as the gold standard, and the team broke down when those certs pay off versus when they're overkill.
• Documentation as a craft. A recurring theme: in DFIR, the report is the deliverable. If it isn't written down, it didn't happen.
• Memorable cases. Stories ranged from preventing a ransomware attack mid-incident to uncovering corporate fraud, the kinds of cases that show why the work matters.
• The "pitbull mentality". The episode's namesake: persistence, ethics, and a refusal to let a case go half-answered. Combined with constant learning, that's what keeps an analyst effective as the tech keeps shifting underneath them.

Why this one stuck with me

Being on the interviewer side rather than the answering side was useful in a different way. You don't get to bluff, you have to actually understand the answers in real time so the follow-up makes sense. Hearing experienced practitioners talk through their reasoning, what they trust, what they distrust, what they look for first when an alert lands, is the kind of context that doesn't fit neatly into a course outline.

Big thanks to Pieter, Tjebbe, Borna and Lara for opening up so candidly, to the wider I-Force team for making the recording possible, and to Jesse for being a great co-host.