Day in the Life of DFIR Leader: Bringing Order to Cyber Chaos

Most cyber investigations don’t begin at the beginning. Rather, they begin at the end, after systems are locked, data is exposed, and operations have already been disrupted. The outcome is visible, but the cause is not. From there, everything becomes a process of working backward on an incomplete picture. That’s the unique puzzle that keeps Devon Ackerman, Global Services Leader of Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) firmly planted in the world of chaos every day.

From building systems to investigating them

My path into cybersecurity didn’t begin inside a SOC or forensic lab (although it would take me there eventually). No, it started with building something of my own. While still in college, I launched a small IT business focused on troubleshooting and supporting clients. That early experience of tinkering, problem solving, and exploring cyber problems is what set the foundation for everything that has since followed.

After growing and selling that business, I transitioned into federal law enforcement, joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a Special Agent. There, my focus shifted to digital forensics and investigative work tied to national security, cyber-enabled crime, and complex investigations involving technology. Every case shared a common thread: someone was experiencing the worst moment of their organization - or their life - and needed answers.

That experience shaped more than technical skill, teaching me:

• how to operate with limited information

• how to look at a puzzle and search for the missing pieces, the unknown parts, in order to explain the story of what happened and why

• how to stay steady in high-pressure situations

• how to guide others through uncertainty without adding to it

Today, those same principles carry over into my experience within the private sector. The environment is different, but the mission remains remarkably similar: help people navigate chaos, find the truth, and move forward.

When the full picture doesn’t exist

One of the defining challenges of DFIR is that the story is never handed to you in full.

Clients don’t call with a neat timeline or a complete dataset. They call with fragments, opinions based upon their personal experiences, or the “fifth phase” of an attack, while the first four remain invisible.

Ransom notes appear. Systems fail. Suspicious activity is discovered.

But the questions that matter most - How did this start? What was accessed? How far has it spread? - require working backward from incomplete evidence.

I often compare it to being handed a puzzle with missing pieces and being told to rebuild the image anyway.

At scale, that challenge multiplies. Across thousands of incidents each year, no two scenarios look identical. Some unfold quickly. Others take weeks of careful reconstruction. All require balancing speed with precision because evidence doesn’t last forever, and business decisions can’t wait.

This is where experience becomes critical beyond just technical knowledge and requires true pattern recognition. Understanding where to look first, what signals matter most, and how seemingly unrelated artifacts connect into a coherent narrative.

As a Global Services Leader, my role extends beyond singular investigations. On any given day, I’m helping oversee a portfolio of incidents that span industries, geographies, clientele, and threat types, each with their own technical, legal, and operational complexities.

Our engagements with clients often begin with an initial call that we treat as a scoping conversation. A client, law firm, or insurance carrier reaches out to our response@levelblue.com global intake and requests a conversation, sharing high level details. From there, our teams identify the appropriate expertise and a scoper coordinates and joins a call to begin asking the basic questions: What technologies are in place? What has been observed so far? What are the immediate business impacts and goals? The answers inform next steps and assist in beginning to form a picture that our investigators can build a response plan around. From there, the work becomes orchestration:

• Aligning the engagement manager with forensic investigators and subject matter expertise

• Coordinating with internal or external legal counsel, third party vendors, and potentially the client’s cyber insurance carrier

• Ensuring the right evidence is collected before it is overwritten or lost

• Investigating and navigating the available forensic evidence in order to build a fact-based timeline of what occurred

Every step has to serve multiple audiences at once. Technical teams need actionable detail and an order of operations. Legal teams need clarity around exposure (what was accessed, viewed, or acquired by an unauthorized third party). Leadership needs direction on how to stabilize the business and navigate complex B2B relationships. At this level, the investigation is more about coordination across disciplines, priorities, and time constraints.

Leading from the frontlines

There’s a common misconception that leadership roles in cybersecurity become purely administrative over time. I like to challenge that idea head on. While much of a leader’s day involves overseeing operations, reviewing reports, and ensuring consistency of delivery across teams, an engaged leader is actively involved in the investigative process. The involvement may be in reviewing findings with a critical lens, identifying patterns that emerge from seeing how different teams approach complex problems, asking the questions that shift an investigation forward, and ensuring every report balances forensic accuracy and investigative results for the reader’s needs. Part of my role is to bring perspective to the details and connect individual investigations into broader insights to ensure quality is consistent across our global service teams while simultaneously maintaining alignment across teams. With multiple groups contributing to investigations, consistency in language, tone, methodology, and deliverables becomes essential. It’s not enough to solve an incident. The expertise is often viewed by a client in our ability to communicate and deliver in a way that clients can understand, trust, and act on. That balance between leadership and hands-on engagement is what allows effective scaling without losing depth.

Restoring more than systems

In a perfect world, every investigation would follow every lead to its fullest conclusion. In reality, priorities are shaped by business needs.

Clients ultimately determine what matters most, often based on business interruption, regulatory concerns, contractual obligations, or financial constraints.

My role is to guide those decisions by outlining risks, recommending investigative paths, and clarifying trade-offs.

From there, response efforts align with what the client needs most urgently, balanced against preservation of evidence, often with a focus on restoring operations quickly while continuing to investigate in parallel.

This balance between ideal investigation and practical constraints is one of the defining realities of consulting. It requires not just technical expertise, but the ability to translate complex risk into clear, actionable choices that can ultimately help organizations recover and become more resilient.

That recovery often starts with immediate containment: stopping ongoing activity (containment), preserving evidence (original and derivative evidence copies), and stabilizing systems (return to normal). But it doesn’t end there.

One of the most lasting outputs of an engagement is what comes next: a structured path forward and a clear understanding of how to minimize and support prevention of the next one.

In many investigations, clients who begin in crisis leave with something far more valuable:
confidence in their ability to handle the future.

So, what does a global DFIR leader really do?

At a high level, the answer is straightforward: they help organizations navigate cyber incidents. But in practice, it’s far more nuanced. It means:

• reconstructing events from incomplete data

• guiding decisions under pressure

• aligning technical, legal, and business priorities

• scaling expertise across thousands of client engagements

• and supporting both clients and teams through high-stakes situations

It also means remembering that behind every incident is a human impact.

For the responders, it may be another case.

For the client, it’s often a defining moment.

The role is to bridge that gap with clarity, experience, and a steady hand, so that organizations can move from uncertainty to understanding, and from disruption to recovery.

And in a field defined by constant change, that ability to bring order to chaos remains one of the most critical skills of all.