InsightForge

About InsightForge

Built by a practitioner. Designed for the field.

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Michael Bauman

Michael Bauman

Founder · Digital Forensics & Intelligence Professional

I'm a Senior Digital Forensics and Incident Response Consultant with a deep background in technical digital investigations — mobile forensics, computer forensics, and building the kind of evidence that holds up in federal court. I build production-grade intelligence workflows deployed at enterprise scale — the kind that cross-reference thousands of sources, surface what actually matters, and hold up under the scrutiny of professional operators. My work supports one of the largest managed security operations in the world, protecting critical infrastructure and government clients across multiple continents.

That's the methodology behind InsightForge.

Before cybersecurity, I spent nine years as a digital forensics detective at El Paso County Sheriff's Office — building criminal cases from records, filings, and data trails most investigators overlook. I qualified as an expert witness in the Tenth District Court of the United States. I know what it means to construct intelligence that holds up under scrutiny.

And before that, I spent nearly a decade in the field as a district sales manager. I know exactly what it feels like to walk into a cold room with nothing but a pitch deck and five minutes to make it matter.

Most people have one of those backgrounds. Very few have all three. InsightForge exists because of that combination — forensic discipline applied to a problem I've lived from the other side of the table.

Credentials & Certifications

GIAC Certified Forensics Examiner (GCFE)
Cellebrite Certified Physical Analyst (CCPA)
Cellebrite Advanced Smartphone Analyst (CASA)
Magnet Certified Forensic Examiner (MCFE)
Expert Witness — 10th District Court, U.S.
National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C)
SANS FOR500 Windows Forensics
National Computer Forensics Institute

Background

U.S. Air Force — Honor Graduate, BMT & Police Academy
Patrol Officer — Salida PD & Evans PD (10 years)
AFLAC District Sales Manager — nearly 10 years, Super Fireball Award
Digital Forensics Detective — El Paso County Sheriff (9 years)
Expert Witness — 10th District Court, U.S.
Senior DFIR Consultant, private sector (2025–present)
OSINT & threat intel, global critical infrastructure clients
ForensicHunter — open-source forensic analysis platform
Published author, Police Magazine

Why I built this

When I was selling insurance, I didn't have a research team. Nobody handed me a dossier before a cold call. You walked in with your product sheet and figured it out in the room. Sometimes that worked. A lot of times it didn't.

Years later, as a detective, I learned what serious pre-work actually looks like — the kind that holds up in court, that builds a case from public records and data trails most people walk right past. The difference between a weak case and a strong one almost always came down to depth of preparation.

At some point it became obvious: salespeople are walking into high-stakes meetings every day with the preparation habits of the first scenario, and they need the discipline of the second. InsightForge bridges that gap — applying a forensic research methodology to the pre-meeting intelligence problem, so you can walk in knowing something the other person doesn't expect you to know.

I've spent my career building tools that create genuine leverage — workflows that don't just save time, but fundamentally change what's possible. That's what this is.

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