Cyber Pulse Podcast Episodes
Episode 011: Digital Forensics and Incident Response in the World of Industrial Control Systems with Lesley Carhart (Available 6/26/2025)
Welcome to Cyber Pulse Episode 11 (Available 6/26/2025 on Spotify or Apple Podcast.)
It's Pride Month, and in this episode of Cyber Pulse, we reach halfway around the globe to interview the amazing Lesley Carhart. They are a US Air Force veteran, DEFCON Hacker of the Year, and currently Director of Incident Response for North America at the industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, Inc., leading response to and proactively hunting for threats in customers’ ICS environments.
They share how they got started, the critical differences in Incident Response in OT environments from typical IT environments, how to avoid common mistakes when working with ICS, some guidance on how to break into the field, and why they had to move to Australia.
Topics discussed: Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR), DFIR in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Operational Technology (OT) environments, key Incident Response differences between IT and OT environments, getting into ICS/OT
In our News Pulse, Godfather malware is using virtualization to steal data from legit banking apps.
PODCAST LINKS: Cyber Pulse on Spotify OR Cyber Pulse on Apple
GUEST DETAILS (See bio & photo)
Lesley Carhart is the Director of Incident Response for North America at the industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, Inc., leading response to and proactively hunting for threats in customers’ ICS environments.
Prior to joining Dragos, Lesley was the incident response team lead at Motorola Solutions. Following four years as a Principal Incident Responder for Dragos, Lesley now manages a team of incident response and digital forensics professionals across North America who perform investigations of commodity, targeted, and insider threat cases in industrial networks.
Lesley is also a certified instructor and curriculum developer for Dragos’ incident response and threat hunting courses. Lesley is honored to be retired from the United States Air Force Reserves, and to have received recognition such as “DEF CON Hacker of the Year”, “SANS Difference Maker”, and “Power Player” from SC Magazine.
You may find Lesley organizing resumé and interview clinics at several cybersecurity conferences, lecturing, blogging, and posting prolifically about cybersecurity on social platforms. When not working, Lesley enjoys being a youth martial arts instructor.
Connect with Lesley online:
