I'm new here so I hope I don't bore you too much with background. I have been consulting and implementing IT solutions in the small to medium business market for 15 years and have been doing computer work for 5 years before that. My speciality for the last 6 years or so has been high availability/business continuity.
Six to eight times a year a client will ask me to investigate a users activities or image a PC. I have happily performed these task and have never had to testify in court. Either suites were settled or never went forward.
However I have recently uncovered that Michigan has a law that one must possess a Private Investigators license to do computer forensics. From my understanding the minute a client says I need to investigate a user I am committing a felony without a PI license.
Michigan law requires two components. First component is a general security certification and even mentions the CISSP as one that is acceptable to the licensing department. I don't want to sound conceited but I am pretty confident I can get this one done quickly. The CISSP complements the consulting I am doing and I'm sure will not be a hard sell to the company owners.
The second component is of curse actual forensics training. The requirements are 40 hours of training, a written exam, and a practical exam. The CCE seems to fit this requirement perfectly. However this is an expensive option. I see there is a self paced online options for training which will make my company happy they don't have to be without my income for a week. Still this is pretty expensive for something we only do a few times a year.
Don't get me wrong. I love doing this kind of work and normally when this comes up I am the guy in the office that gets sent because of my interest in it. But I have to be able to justify the expense. I guess an option is to outsource the work whenever it comes up but I want to continue doing it. So the question is are there any other forensics certs that have 40 hours of training, a written exam, and a practical exam that are less expensive? Besides the CCE Bootcamp is there any other training that is less expensive that do a good job in preparing you for the CCE test? All comments are welcome.