Paul Sanderson

After leaving school in 1978 Paul joined the Royal Navy as a Radio Electrical Mechanic, he worked on various ships until on his second trip "down South" (the Falklands) he spent a little time flying around as a passenger in Wasp helicopters. Seeing the light, and recognizing that fixing radios would soon move from following a circuit board to find a dodgy valve to pressing a self-test button and changing a circuit board, he decided that a life in the air was the way to go. Paul started the second part of his career in 1984 at Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose in Cornwall (South West England) training to be an Anti-Submarine Warfare Aircrewman. The next few years would see Paul undergoing nearly 18 months training followed by some front-line time tracking "Red" submarines and a little bit of time as an instructor. This was followed by the best and most rewarding flying in his aviation career, where Paul got to spend 4 years on 771 Naval Air Squadron flying Search and Rescue missions around the UK's South West peninsula. During his time in the Navy, Paul studied for, and obtained, a Degree from the Open University majoring in Computer Science. After leaving the Navy in 1993 Paul worked at Dr. Solomons in the Data Recovery and Forensic Computing department, progressing to senior management. During his time here Paul undertook a number of high profile investigations and was responsible for the software development side of the FlightServer - a hardware/software forensics imaging and investigations tool. In 2000 Sanderson Forensics Ltd was born, his own computer forensic consultancy, undertaking both criminal and civil investigation cases, but always with a plan to write his own computer forensic software. While some software did get written (SB2 was a program designed to extract a disk image off a SafeBacktm tape and create a DD image from it - KaZaAlyzer and SkypeAlyzer), this had taken a bit of a back seat as the investigation side of the business took off. In 2007 Paul obtained a Masters degree from University College Dublin in Forensic Computing and Cyber Crime Investigations. Eventually, in 2010, Paul decided to move back to Cornwall and concentrate on writing software which culminated in the Forensic Toolkit for SQLite. While in Cornwall, Paul answered "surprise" when asked, "do you want a particular present or a surprise for your 50th birthday?"… a wedding wasn't quite what was expected!. Paul & Helen have been happily married ever since, living in a lovely old cottage in a pretty little fishing village (the front cover picture is just a few minutes' walk from our home). Pauls hobbies include making his wife happy and mountain biking, in no particular order .