Eric Cole

I write this week about a famous person in the field of information security.  Eric Cole completed his undergraduate and masters degrees from the New York Institute of Technology.  He went on to George Mason University, where he completed is coursework, but not his dissertation.  He later received his Ph.D. from Pace University.  After graduation, Dr. Cole went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency where he was the Internet Program Manager and computer engineer in the office of security.

Dr. Cole has written and co-authored many books including:

                Hackers Beware

                Hiding in Plain Site

                Network Security Bible

                Insider Threat

                Cyber Spying: Tracking Your Family's (Sometimes) Secret Online Lives

                Network Security Fundamentals

                Hiding in Plain Sight: Steganography and the Art of Covert Communication

                SANS Security Essentials

                Network Security Bible

He is also the inventor of over 20 patents.

So, his publications are not in the peer-reviewed academic press, but his books are certainly on the bookshelves of more people than the number of people who will read the articles that many of us will ever publish.

What I admire about Dr. Cole is that while he was doing all of this work, he realized that none of it mean anything unless people were able to take action on what he knew.  He helped to found the SANS Institute, an organization that teaches security curriculum to computer professionals.  When academia moved slowly to the world of Information Science, Cole and others moved quickly.

They realized that professional education in actionable methods were important.  However, the companies in industry weren't doing the job.  Companies like Cisco and Microsoft had their professional certifications on their products and there were some low-level vendor agnostic programs for technician certification (Comp-TIA's A+), but there was a large gap at the professional level, especially in security.

So, at the risk of irritating both the vendors and the academics, Cole and others started teaching their own curriculum.  They developed it, rolled it out and starting teaching seminar style with week-long classes.  Sure, they were paid well - the average SANS class costs $5,000 per person to attend for the week and SANS now has an estimated annual sales of $30M - but face it... it's hard to pull together a good class with solid resources and get people to come back again and again.

Today, Cole is a senior scientist with Lockheed Martin Information Technology (LMIT) and Lockheed Martin (LM) fellow.  He also is the founder and CTO of Secure Anchor Consulting, which is basically his consulting and outreach mechanism.  So, between Lockheed, SANS and Secure Anchor, Eric Cole lives the life of teaching, research and outreach - the three functions that a tenure-track professor in any university does.

Oh, and how old is he?  I can't seem to locate solid information about his age.  I guess he learned a thing or two about keeping some information private when he worked at the CIA.