Lodrina Cherne

Lodrina also helps students use forensic principles to understand artifacts they might not have even known existed, providing a strong sense of user activity. These artifacts include logons, the external devices used, and the websites visited, among many others.

Lodrina’s current role as Staff Forensic Engineer at DigitalOcean builds on her security career in digital forensics and incident response, corporate security, and policy. She previously worked as the Principal Security Advocate at Cybereason, working to advance security policy and standards. Before that, she worked as a computer forensics examiner for Arsenal Consulting, where she focused on preservation and analysis of electronic evidence, including host-based analysis of Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS systems in matters of intellectual property theft, employment disputes, and evidence tampering.

Lodrina cares about how the real world implications of technology and explored cybersecurity safety efforts as a Fellow at Aspen Institute’s Technology Policy Hub. She also performed research with the Technology and Social Change Research Project in the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School.

Lodrina has been pursuing her interests or working in cybersecurity for more than 15 years. In one particularly memorable investigation, she helped in the acquittal of more than 200 foreign imprisoned senior military officers in Turkey after showing that the electronic documents used to indict them were forged. Known as "Sledgehammer," the case involved sophisticated forgery and backdating of documents related to a military coup in Turkey. Lodrina explained that while everything in the indictment initially looked "right" on the surface to tools and parsers, a few details just didn't line up. "Digging through documents at the lowest level and finding the answers in hex was extremely satisfying and had real-world ramifications for the people who had been wrongly indicted," she says.

Lodrina has a bachelor's degree in computer science from Boston University and holds the GCFE, GCFA, and GASF certifications. Lodrina is also a faculty member of the SANS Technology Institute, an NSA Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense and multiple winner of the National Cyber League competition. She was named to SC Magazine's prestigious Women in IT Security 2019 issue in the Women to Watch category and is a member of what Washington Post reporter Joe Menn calls “the oldest active, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time.”

Lodrina is a powerhouse outside of work as well. She's an internationally classed powerlifter who earned the title of National Champion at the 2013 USA Powerlifting championship and received the bronze medal at the 2014 IPF World Championships. Other pursuits away from the keyboard include motorcycle trips across the USA and abroad. She literally goes the extra mile when teaching for SANS, once riding 1,500 miles before starting a week of forensics instruction! She is also a volunteer case reviewer for the Massachusetts foster care system and there’s high liklihood she’ll work a picture of her cats into her class.