Digital Forensics Over the Decades: Meet Peraton's Bob Renko

In Bob Renko’s very first court appearance, a defense attorney asked him to define forensics.

“The word forensic comes from the Latin word forensis, meaning ‘in open court,’” Renko explained. “So, in its simplest definition, forensics is the application of science to law. It’s a great example of how the digital forensics world differs from other cyber-related fields.”

Over a 35-year career in the digital forensics field, Renko, Peraton’s Senior Account Executive for Department of Defense Cyber, has been called on countless times to testify in court as an expert witness. When Renko takes the stand, he usually discusses the technical processes used to collect evidence and analyze it. His team can figure out who committed a crime, whether an alibi is true or false, and find details of past crimes or evidence of intent to commit future crimes. Uncovering evidence to use in court often closes the case.

Renko joined the U.S. Air Force as a teenager and began his career as a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) doing technical surveillance like wiretaps and vehicle tracking in support of criminal, counterintelligence and antiterrorism investigations. After leaving active duty and earning his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice at Columbia College and master’s degree in aeronautics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Renko rejoined OSI as a civilian special agent specializing in computer crime investigations.

Renko has held numerous positions within OSI, including working at the Department of Defense Cyber Crimes Center (DC3), which fell under OSI until February 2021, when it was realigned under the Air Force Inspector General.

Since his time at DC3, Renko’s career has progressed away from hands-on analysis to cyber sector leadership roles in government, from serving as Deputy Director of the FBI’s National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force to serving as Chief Information Officer of OSI. These roles have taken him all over the world, including Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

“One of the most rewarding cases I worked on involved false testimony,” said Renko. The team he oversaw had proved a suspect was innocent. “The subject’s wife had made an allegation against him, so that he would be found guilty and imprisoned. But our forensic examination of the evidence showed that it was actually the wife’s boyfriend who had planted evidence to implicate the husband.”

The draw to digital forensics for Renko is precisely these kinds of stories. “Analyzing digital media has a dramatic impact on someone’s life — it could change the course of their life forever,” he said. He admits that digital forensics is not for everyone, since the work often involves very disturbing cases.

There is a sense of accomplishment with every digital forensics case. Renko compares the work to a factory: raw product comes in, workers process it, then the finished product is shipped out.

Renko’s focus in his career has been cyber investigations, intrusions, security, and insider threats. Within his niche, the pace of change is fast. “If you’re not doing digital forensics every day, you fall behind,” said Renko. “I remember when I started as an IT forensics leader in 2003,” said Renko. “It was exciting when we bought one terabyte of storage, which took up an entire room. Now my team analyzes over 600 trillion bytes of data a year.”

Any given person has a digital breadcrumb trail spanning decades, full of information about who that individual is: interests, friend groups, locations, messages exchanged, purchases made, financial information, files deleted, browser history, pictures taken, and many other types of information. Computer crime is also so prevalent that studies have suggested that more than 90% of all crimes committed today have a digital component; whether that’s from a mobile device, surveillance system, traditional computer or other type of digital media.

The need for digital forensics continues to grow and with it, the need for specialists in the field.