First post, so "Hi all".

Just wanted to chime in here and say a few things. This thread is weighted fairly heavily on the police side of forensics work, with little attention to forensics in the corporate world.

I do forensics in the corporate world. There's a steadily growing trend in the industry (especially the financial industry) toward acquiring in-house forensics people for both the incident response (server farms) side and the internal forensics (fraud, harrassment, etc) side.

As far as breaking into the field in the corporate world however, the general trend is that the people that do this work are "experts". You don't find private companies hiring forensic people fresh out of college. I'm probably fairly typical, with about 15 yrs of security experience both DoD and private industry.

With products out there such as Encase that are becoming more and more corporate use friendly, and more easily used in conjunction with intrusion detection systems, heads are turning toward predeploying forensic software in server farms and using the tools as part of an incident response program, as opposed to limiting forensics to a more true to form "after the fact find the facts" tool.

All that having been said, the best way to break into forensics without going the law enforcement route is probably to find an organization that uses forensics tools as part of an incident response program and get hired there as a general security practicioner, letting your interests be known. Once there, cross-training into the incident response program could be a viable course.

Good luck.