Robert M. Lee

Robert is a recognized authority in the industrial cybersecurity community. He is CEO and co-founder of Dragos, a global technology leader in cybersecurity for industrial controls systems (ICS)/operational technology (OT) environments.

Robert is routinely sought after for advice and input on cybersecurity for industrial and critical infrastructure and is regularly asked to brief national leaders. He testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce–Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and to the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to advise on policy issues related to critical infrastructure cyber threats. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s subcommittees on Cyber Resilience for the Oil & Gas and Electricity communities and has presented at the WEF’s Annual Meeting in Davos. He also regularly presents at major industry and government conferences globally on the topic of industrial cybersecurity and threats. He serves on the board of the National Cryptologic Foundation.

Robert began his pioneering work in ICS/OT cybersecurity as a U.S. Air Force Cyber Warfare Operations Officer tasked to the National Security Agency, where he built a first-of-its-kind mission identifying and analyzing national threats to industrial infrastructure. He went on to build the industrial community’s first dedicated monitoring and incident response class at the SANS Institute (ICS515) and the industry recognized cyber threat intelligence course (FOR578). Today, he is a SANS Fellow.

SC Media named Robert the Security Executive of the Year for 2022. A business leader but also technical practitioner, he helped lead the investigation into the 2015 attack on Ukraine’s power grid, the first time an electric system was taken down due to a cyberattack. With his team at Dragos he has been involved in the most significant cyberattacks on industrial infrastructure, including the investigation and analysis of the 2016 attack on Ukraine’s electric system, the 2017 TRISIS attack on a Saudi Arabian petrochemical facility in the first attempt to try to kill people through malicious software, and the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. In 2022, his team at Dragos uncovered PIPEDREAM, a highly flexible framework to attack industrial infrastructure globally. Robert’s work has been featured in the book Sandworm and on 60 Minutes.