Profile
Michiel’s varied background brings a broad perspective when working with entities and organizations with differing needs. “Thinking like a system administrator is a good way of finding misconfigurations, as is thinking like a Blue Teamer when avoiding detection. My professional environments taught me to work within the limitations of the situation we are in. This is particularly the case with offensive operations. The Red Team does not control the environment, the system owner does. It is up to us as a Red Team to be creative within that environment and its limitations.”
Michiel brings this perspective, along with his ability to breakdown complex subjects into easily digestible explanations, to SANS students. He is able to go into the nitty gritty of the material, whilst keeping you focused on the highways and not the byways. In this way, Michiel keeps his students on track, learning the logic behind different techniques, as well as the proper application. On this, he notes, “It's not just a matter of 'how', but more importantly 'why'.” This logical approach is invaluable to security practitioners diving into the lowest level programming language that is still human readable, Assembly, and learning “the coolest field of infosec”, exploit development.
In his free time, Michiel prefers to leave the screen for a bit, opting for outdoor activity, like running, riding his motorcycle, or snowboarding, or some quiet time, reading books.