Dr. Eric Cole spent more than twenty years doing the work most people only lecture about — hands-on in IT and network security, in the rooms where breaches were real and the decisions had consequences. He founded Secure Anchor Consulting and became one of the industry’s most trusted authorities, serving on the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th President of the United States.
He wrote the books that sat on a generation of practitioners’ desks — Cyber Crisis, Advanced Persistent Threat, Hackers Beware, Network Security Bible — and he gave the industry a message it needed more than another tool: security doesn’t fail for lack of talent. It fails for lack of leadership. Practitioners get paid for what they do; leaders get paid for what they decide.
That conviction became his CISO programs: Becoming a CISO, the CISO Certification course — the only one of its kind developed by a working CISO expert — and the vCISO path. He developed and recorded them himself, the way he did everything: practical, tested, and honest about what the seat actually requires.
Eric believed the seat at the table is a skill set — and he spent his final working years making sure that skill set didn’t stay locked inside the people who already had it. His teaching continues at Career Path Partners exactly as he recorded it. That is his legacy, and we are honored to carry it.