Interview with Jacopo (forum member 'jaclaz')

Jacopo, you’re an active member of the Forensic Focus forums. How did you become interested in digital forensics?

My interests are oriented towards OS booting, filesystems and data recovery. These fields are of course closely linked to digital forensics.

I was one of those kids that disassembled things to see what was inside them and understand how they worked (and I even managed to reassemble a few items properly!) Computers have been a hobby since the time I built (some of the readers may be old enough to remember the good ol'times) my first computer, a Sinclair ZX-80, and more generally I have been always interested in any kind of technology. If the term had been already invented at the time I could have easily been defined as a "geek".

Then, in my professional life, I had a few occasions to find what I call "the IT wall". At least here in Italy in the years when computers entered the corporate world there was an abundance of a particular kind of IT guy, that took advantage of the fact that no one else was familiar with the way computers worked and either provided answers like "it is not possible" or "you can't do that", or "well, we will need to hire a professional programmer and it will take 6 months to have that". Due to some peculiarities of my character, "it is impossible" or "you can't do that" are like magic words to induce me to prove that it is actually possible and that I can do it (or at least find the actual reason why something is impossible). On a couple of occasions it happened that everything that was needed to create a Work Progress Report was somehow stuck in a corrupt hard disk or in a program database that went astray. Due to Murphy's Law these events normally happened on Saturdays or during the holiday periods, and something needed to be done, and quickly, and most probably with the help of some luck and ingenuity, I was able to recover the hard disk contents or rebuild the broken database, etc. This made me take an interest in the field, and since then I studied a bit more in this niche...

http://www.forensicfocus.com/c/aid=65/interviews/2013/jacopo-forum-member-jaclaz/