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Chris Lester
Chris has over 20 years of experience in digital forensics, e-discovery, and has provided education and training to a variety of audiences. Before working at Computer Forensic Services in 2019, Chris was a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He worked for the FBI for 29 years, in the San Francisco and Minneapolis Divisions, working white-collar crime, cyber, and intellectual property crime investigations.
Chris was a founding member of the Minnesota Cyber Crimes Task Force and was the Acting Supervisory Special Agent for the Cyber Squad in the Minneapolis Division of the FBI. Chris has taught at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, teaching new Computer Forensic Examiners standard operating procedures and techniques.
While working in computer forensics with the FBI, Chris worked on high profile cases to include Zacarias Moussaoui’s involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks and the Red Lake High School shooting investigation, which involved multiple teenage suspects and hundreds of computers. He examined digital media from several types of investigations to include counter-terrorism, child pornography, white-collar crime, organized crime, civil rights, kidnappings, and thefts of intellectual property.
Chris is versed in a myriad of operating systems to include Windows, Apple, virtual environments, and various flavors of Linux. Besides his basic forensic computer training and his previous computer programming and database management, he also studied forensic analysis of digital cameras and forensic recovery from digital video recorders (DVRs). Chris has testified countless times in Federal court regarding his examinations and the collection of evidence in regards to executed search warrants.
Chris spent over five years on the Evidence Response Team (ERT), a team of special agents and professional support employees, trained to respond to large or sophisticated crime scenes to process evidence. In addition to the hundreds of hours of digital forensic training that Chris has received, he also received over 600 hours of advanced crime scene management training.