About Us

• About Us
• Staff
• Jobs

About Us

NetCerto was founded in October 2001 to focus on the previously unmet IT needs of small to medium sized businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. We worked for an incredible array of startups, and as they grew, major companies. Our service offerings focused primarily on IT, but we also covered basic facilities requirements, network security, physical security, and internal investigations.

By 2006, requests to respond to network intrusions and possible intellectual property thefts were increasing and our founder, David Kovar, started focusing more exclusively on investigations and computer forensics. By 2008 we'd left the IT consulting space and were working exclusively on computer forensics, incident response, and electronic discovery.

Now, in 2011, after spending many years inside the sausage factory, we are developing tools and services designed to enable other ediscovery and computer forensics consumers to make more informed decisions about their tool and service providers as well as to better measure the accuracy of their own processes.

Staff Biographies

David Kovar:

David Kovar received a BA in Computer Science from Dartmouth College in 1986 and has been actively providing software engineering and IT consulting services and management since that date. Mr. Kovar has worked for powerhouses such as Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, and Ciena Corp but his forte is in providing “soup to nuts” computing and IT management environments for small startup companies and conducting forensics investigations.

In addition to his training and experience on the IT side, Mr. Kovar has actively pursued training, experience and certification in law enforcement, computer forensics, security and disaster management. He has managed search and rescue missions on four continents, acquired PC 832 and Level 3 certification in California, holds an active California private investigator’s license, holds multiple industry certifications, contributes regularly to the community, and develops open source computer forensics tools

John Allred :

John Allred earned his BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After MIT, he participated in a number of technical firsts – the first internal hard drive for the Macintosh, the first large scale networked simulation of military vehicles (SIMNET), and the first large scale networking engine for video games and distributed systems (RTIME, acquired by Sony as the enabler for all networked PlayStation 2 games). He has also done extensive work in layer 4-7 load balancing and SSL termination (F5 Networks); embedded applications and systems (Stratos, Apple); large scale web services, systems, and evangelism (Microsoft); and cryptography, security, hardware interfaces, and malware analysis at a startup. He has held the roles of developer, developer lead, and Chief Technology Officer.

He excels at system architecture definition, technical presentations, and closing the technical sale. He is an inventor on one issued patent and several more in work at the US patent office; holds the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) credential; and is a computer forensics examiner.

Ken Pryor:

Ken Pryor has been an Illinois police officer since 1987 and has worked in
the area of digital forensics and computer crime investigation since 2008.
He has extensive experience in the investigation of all types of cases,
both computer and non-computer related.

Mr. Pryor has trained with the SANS organization, completing their
Advanced Computer Forensic Analysis and Incident Response course, after
which he obtained the GIAC Certified Forensic Analyst certification. He
followed that up by also completing the SANS Advanced Filesystem Recovery
and Memory Forensics course. He has also completed computer forensics
courses provided by the National White Collar Crime Center.

In addition to forensic analysis work, Mr. Pryor has also provided
computer repair, security services and malware related work to both
private individuals and local government agencies.

Jobs

There are no open positions at the present time.