Prior to joining Attivo Networks, Mr. Cole held executive positions at FireEye, McAfee and Symantec. He’s retired from the U.S. Army, where he worked in intelligence, communications, and cryptography around the world including building out the Network Security Services at the Pentagon. Mr. Cole served previously on numerous boards and government committees and today serves on (ISC)² Board of Directors as Treasurer and Chair of Audit and Risk. He also serves on the NASA Advisory Council as a Member-At-Large under appointment by the NASA Administrator.

In 2014, he received the Government Computer News Industry IT Executive of the Year award, and in 2015 he was inducted into the Wash 100 by Executive Mosaic as one of the most influential executives impacting Government. In 2018 he was awarded the Reboot Leadership Influencer Award by SC Media. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer networking and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).

He spent 22 years in the U.S. Navy. He has worked as both software and systems engineer on a variety of Department of Defense projects and early on was chosen as a member of the project to bring Internet access to ships at sea. Following this highly successful project he was selected to head the team that built a Network Operations and Security Center (NOSC) that provided services to the commands ashore and ships at sea in the Norwegian Sea and Atlantic Ocean . He served as the Leading Chief of Information Security at the NOSC for six years. While there he created a Strategy and Training plan for the development of an expert team that took personnel with little or no experience and built them into expert team members for manning of the NOSC.

He is an Instructor, Curriculum Developer, Technical Editor and Author for Computer Forensics, and Hacking courses. He is the author of the EC Council Ethical Hacking Core Skills, Advanced Penetration Testing and ICS/SCADA Security courses. He has presented at the Blackhat USA, Hacker Halted, ISSA and TakeDownCon conferences as well as many others. He has chaired the Cybercrime and Cyberdefense Summit in Oman and was Executive Chairman of the Oil and Gas Cyberdefense Summit. He is author of Building Virtual Pentesting Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing 1 st and 2 nd edition, Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly Secured Environments 2nd Edition and Backtrack: Testing Wireless Network Security. He holds a BS in Computer Science from National University in California and a MS in Software Engineering from the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas. He developed the Strategy and Training Development Plan for the first Government CERT in the country of Oman that recently was rated as the top CERT for the Middle East. He serves as a professional training consultant to the Oman Information Technology Authority, and developed the team to man the first Commercial Security Operations Center in the country of Oman. He has worked extensively with banks and financial institutions throughout the Middle East, Europe and the UK in the planning of a robust and secure architecture and implementing requirements to meet compliance. He currently provides consultancy to Commercial companies. He provides training and consultancy to the Oman CERT and the SOC team in monitoring and incident identification of intrusions and incidents within the Gulf region. He holds the CEH, ECSA. LPT, APT, CHFI and a number of other certifications.