Cole Vane

I work in cybersecurity in Central Europe, primarily hardening Microsoft environments — Active Directory, Entra ID, Group Policy, endpoints. The stuff that actually gets attacked.

I started where most of us start: help desk. Moved into sysadmin work, managed AD, endpoints, email, backups — the full stack with no dedicated security team and no budget. After several years of that, I moved into security engineering full-time because I kept finding the same gaps in every environment I touched.

I started The Hardening Brief because I wanted a resource I wish I had when I was a sysadmin — one hardening fix per week, copy-paste ready, no fluff, no sales pitch. Just the GPO path, the PowerShell command, and why it matters. Free.

If any of that sounds useful, the newsletter lands every Wednesday morning.