Dawn Cappelli

Dawn Cappelli is the Director of OT-CERT (Operational Technology –Cyber Emergency Readiness Team) at Dragos. Dragos OT-CERT provides free resources for the industrial control system (ICS) /OT community that are developed to support asset owners and operators of industrial infrastructure. As cybersecurity risks in OT environments continue to rise, many organizations struggle with the resources or expertise to address them, especially small to medium-sized businesses (SMB). OT-CERT was created with these organizations in mind. In addition, vulnerabilities discovered by Dragos’s Threat Intelligence team are publicly disclosed through OT-CERT. Dawn coordinates with teams from across Dragos to create OT cybersecurity resources suitable for the SMB community. She also builds and organizes an OT-CERT partnership network of global public and private sector leaders and partners to enable and replicate best practices across industries and expand the Dragos commitment to help mitigate shared ICS/OT challenges.

Dawn was CISO for Rockwell Automation from 2016-2022 after serving as Director, Insider Risk. Previously she was founder and director of Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute CERT Insider Threat Center. She started her career as a software engineer programming nuclear power plants for Westinghouse. She co-authored the book, “The CERT Guide to Insider Threats: How to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Information Technology Crimes (Theft, Sabotage, Fraud),” which was inducted into the Cybersecurity Canon, which is a list of must-read books for all cybersecurity practitioners.

Cappelli is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional, holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh, is co-founder of the Open Source Insider Threat (OSIT) information sharing group and is a member of the RSA Conference Advisory Board, the Cybersecurity Collaborative Executive Committee, and the CyberWire Hash Table. She was awarded the 2022 CIO Choice Lifetime Achievement Award by the Pittsburgh Technology Council, inducted into the ISSA Hall of Fame in 2021, honored as a member of the 2021 CISOs Top 100 CISOs, 2020 Global CISO 100, and was named Pittsburgh CISO of the Year in 2018.