About Andy Harbison
Andy joined Grant Thornton in 2009, having previously established and led the IT forensics units at two Big Four firms.
He is the most experienced computer forensics investigator in private practice in Ireland. He has completed in excess of 350 separate computer investigations for clients ranging from multinational companies and major financial services companies to small and medium-sized enterprises and private individuals. He has innovated a number of important IT investigative techniques and seen them put into Irish precedent.
He is the country’s most experienced electronic discovery practitioner and has completed dozens of e-discovery assignments under Irish, UK and US rules of evidence. He has recently written chapters on computer fraud and electronic discovery for the Law Society of Ireland Solicitors’ Practice Guides, and advised the Law Society committee on electronic discovery.
As a specialist in IT incident management, he has helped a number of major firms develop their IT incident management plans.
Andy began his career as a system analyst and administrator with Siemens in Germany, rising to computer systems manager with the company’s Kuwait Emergency Response team.
During his five years at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Andy lectured in operations and IT management, while conducting research into process management, business process improvement and information management. He has produced over a dozen publications in these areas.
Andy is also a highly experienced “white-hat” hacker and has conducted and managed a large number of passive and intrusion tests on clients’ IT networks, both internal and external. He has been lead instructor in hacking techniques both in a big four firms extreme hacking courses and Microsoft’s trusted computing initiative.