Randori, the company that Attacks to Protect™, today announced that Rear Admiral Dan MacDonnell, U.S. Navy (Ret) has joined the company as its Chief Strategy Officer. In this role, MacDonnell will apply his past military and business cyber experience to shape Randori’s product strategy, helping companies defend forward faster by applying an offensive mindset.
MacDonnell is the former deputy chief of the National Security Agency (NSA)/Central Security Service, (CSS) and former Chief Resilience Officer at State Street, giving him a unique blend of defense and private sector experience. In 2013, a time that saw a significant increase in offensive nation-state cyber activities, MacDonnell was selected as the Deputy Commander of the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command/US Tenth Fleet. This organization is responsible for Navy information network operations, offensive and defensive cyberspace operations, signals intelligence, and space operations. He oversaw full spectrum cybersecurity operations—including offensive and attack capabilities—putting him in the position of understanding the attacker’s perspective and applying that to create better defenses. In his role at State Street, MacDonnell applied his offensive mindset to his role as a defender, helping the company’s security organization become more proactive and anticipatory rather than reactive.
“Having worked in multiple DOD cyber and intelligence organizations, I have first-hand experience with the capabilities our enemies possess. When possible, you have to be vigilant on what attackers are doing and apply those learnings to defend better. But after transitioning to the private sector, I can confidently say that most businesses do not have a handle on our adversaries and lack the capacity to apply offensive learnings to their security programs,” said Dan MacDonnell. “My personal passion is to help companies—regardless of where they sit on the cyber maturity scale—and in this role at Randori, I get to apply my military and civilian acumen to a platform in an emerging space. Randori has a handle on the emerging attack surface management market better than anyone else I’ve encountered. Its innovative strategy of incorporating the attacker’s perspective, plus the continuous & persistent nature of the platform puts it leagues ahead of the competition.”
“Dan has deep operational cyber expertise, and years of hands-on leadership roles in the financial sector and military organizations,” said Brian Hazzard, CEO and co-founder Randori. “Dan knows that waiting for the next attack to test our defenses is no longer viable—the private sector has to apply an offensive mindset to their security programs in order to stay one step ahead. At State Street he helped one company become more resilient—at Randori he’ll be able to help thousands. I couldn’t be more excited to have him on our team.”
Hear Dan MacDonnell speak at the SANS Institute Virtual event on Shadow IT Elimination, scheduled for October 29th at 10:30 ET.
Randori is dedicated to helping organizations better understand what’s on their perimeters to reduce their attack surface and stress test their security programs — all to build more resilient security programs. Get a free attack surface review or learn more about the continuous red teaming platform.