Binary Defense — the trusted Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and enterprise defence provider — has announced that its founder, Dave Kennedy, has assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer. The move sees one of the most respected and recognisable practitioners in the global cybersecurity industry step directly into the company he built — to personally lead its most consequential transformation: the development and rapid deployment of NightBeacon, Binary Defense's agentic AI platform for security operations.
A Defining Moment for Cyber Defence
Kennedy founded Binary Defense in 2014 and has served the company in dual roles: as a board member and as Chief Hacking Officer — a title that reflects both the depth of his technical expertise and the practitioner-led philosophy that has always defined the organisation. Now, at what he describes as the most significant inflection point in his career, Kennedy is stepping in as CEO not to manage a stable business, but to lead a fundamental transformation of how Binary Defense delivers security at enterprise scale.
The urgency behind the transition is explicit. The threat landscape, Kennedy argues, is evolving faster than at any point in his two-decade career. Attackers are using AI to accelerate attack velocity, increase the sophistication of social engineering, and automate the exploitation of vulnerabilities at a pace that manual security operations — however talented and well-resourced — simply cannot match. For enterprises relying on conventional Security Operations Centre (SOC) models, the speed gap between defenders and attackers is widening in real time. Binary Defense's response is NightBeacon — and Kennedy is returning to the helm to ensure that response is executed with the conviction and pace the moment demands.
"This is a defining moment for Binary Defense — we are building the next phase of cyber defence, one that won't just match rapidly advancing threats, but fundamentally change the dynamic between defenders and attackers. The threat landscape is evolving faster than at any point in my career, and companies cannot afford to operate at anything less than machine speed." — Dave Kennedy, Founder & CEO, Binary Defense
NightBeacon: Making Every Defender Superhuman
NightBeacon is Binary Defense's agentic AI platform for security operations — built on a philosophy that stands in deliberate contrast to the prevailing narrative around AI and the future of work in cybersecurity. Where many AI security tools are framed explicitly or implicitly as analyst replacements, NightBeacon is built on the principle that the best security operations will always require human judgement at the centre — augmented by AI that handles the speed and scale humans alone cannot match.
The platform delivers agentic capabilities across the three core workflows that define security operations: threat detection, investigation, and response. AI agents autonomously handle the high-volume, time-critical tasks that consume analyst bandwidth — correlating signals, investigating alerts, enriching context, and recommending or initiating responses — while experienced practitioners remain in command of the critical decisions that require human judgement, situational context, and accountability. The result, already validated in production, is 30% faster threat resolution and 99%+ detection accuracy.
Kennedy's framing of the platform captures the philosophy in a single, memorable line: "We are not building AI that replaces defenders. We are building AI that makes every defender on our platform superhuman. That distinction matters. It is the difference between security operations that actually work in production and a science experiment."
"We are not building AI that replaces defenders. We are building AI that makes every defender on our platform superhuman. That distinction matters. It is the difference between security operations that actually work in production and a science experiment."— Dave Kennedy, Founder & CEO, Binary Defense
Who Is Dave Kennedy? The Practitioner Who Built an Industry
Dave Kennedy is one of the most recognised and respected figures in global cybersecurity — a practitioner who has shaped the industry through hands-on technical work, open-source tooling, standards development, and public advocacy. Named one of the Top 10 IT Security Influencers in the World by CISO Platform, his career traces the full arc of modern cybersecurity from its roots in military intelligence to the frontier of agentic AI.
United States Marine Corps — Cyberwarfare & Intelligence
Kennedy's career began in service — completing two tours in Iraq with the US Marine Corps, where he specialised in cyberwarfare and forensics analysis for the US intelligence community. This formative experience — operating in high-stakes, adversarial environments where failure has real-world consequences — shaped the mission-first philosophy that has defined his approach to cybersecurity ever since.
Diebold Incorporated — Chief Security Officer
Moving into the private sector, Kennedy served as CSO at Diebold Incorporated — an international Fortune 1000 company — where he developed a global security programme spanning all aspects of information security and risk management for an organisation operating at significant scale and complexity.
TrustedSec — Founder & CEO (2012)
Kennedy founded TrustedSec in 2012 as an information security consulting firm built on the belief that security advice should come from people who have actually done the work — specialising in attack simulations and strategic risk management. TrustedSec established the practitioner-led philosophy that would later define Binary Defense.
Binary Defense — Founder & Chief Hacking Officer (2014–2026)
Kennedy founded Binary Defense in 2014 to bring the same practitioner-led approach to managed security — building the company's MDR platform and guiding its technology strategy as Chief Hacking Officer and board member before assuming the CEO role to lead the NightBeacon era.
Beyond his executive roles, Kennedy's industry contributions are extensive. He is the co-author of Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide, a co-creator of the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) — adopted by the Payment Card Industry — and the co-founder of DerbyCon, one of the most respected independent security conferences in the world. His tools have featured on the History Channel and the USA Network series Mr. Robot, and he has appeared as a cybersecurity expert on CNN, Fox News, CNBC, and MSNBC. He has presented at DEF CON, Black Hat, Microsoft BlueHat, and the Grace Hopper Conference — the full spectrum of the industry's most significant stages. His alma mater, Bedford High School, named its Kennedy Center for Gaming and Leadership in his honour.