Joachim metz

Joachim Metz is a Digital researcher, IT/IS specialist.

In 2006 he started working in the field of computer forensics as a digital forensic investigator at Hoffmann Investigations. At that time Hoffmann Investigations carried out digital forensic investigations for organisations (private law).

Before that he worked in multiple Information Communication Technology (ICT) disciplines like: system and network administration, programming, deployment, etc. and also Information Security (IS). He has been working in the field of digital forensics for several years now.

Philosophy warning

In his opinion digital forensic investigators should be transparent in both their findings and methods. The statement "the tool provided me with the evidence" just does not cut it. In his work he experienced a lot of serious errors in 'digital forensic software' and corresponding human interpretation, e.g. tools that represent the FAT access date as a date and time value and is interpreted as such. He has put a lot of effort in providing alternatives and means to verify findings by breaking open file formats and improving file recovery methods.

Ancient history alert

For him breaking open file formats dates back to Might and Magic 3 save games and recovering deleted and corrupted files under DOS using PCTOOLS.

Marketing alert

Some of his work are file format libraries like libyal.

Also a proof-of-concept carving tool called ReviveIt (revit), which keeps surprising him because of its versatile application even in recovering NTFS-compressed files.

The challenge he likes about the field of digital forensics is that there is a lot out there still to be discovered ;-)