Delinea appoints David Castignola as new CRO, sales leader

Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions provider Delinea has announced the appointment of David Castignola as its new chief revenue officer.

Castignola will lead the firm’s global sales organisation, bringing 25 years of leadership experience in the cyber security field, including a 20-year stint at cyber security and digital risk management provider RSA.

“I’m thrilled to join Delinea during this exciting, pivotal period of growth at the company,” he said. “Delinea’s comprehensive, industry-recognised PAM portfolio is backed by a vision for this expanding market that our world-class go-to-market organisation is poised to deliver and change how companies of all sizes and across all industries view privileged access.

“This creates a fantastic opportunity for our channel and alliance partners to become indispensable, trusted cyber security allies with their customers.”

Delinea specialises in providing PAM solutions to help businesses secure critical data, devices, code, and cloud infrastructure to reduce risk, ensure compliance, as well as simplify their security setups.

Castignola brings a wealth of experience from a 20-year spell at RSA that culminated in him becoming the leader of its global sales team.

He went on to become the first CRO at Optiv, and guided the acquisition of Cylance, becoming chief operating officer of BlackberryCylance as a result.

Most recently, the cyber security veteran spent the last two years at crowdsourced security provider Bugcrowd, where he successfully helped double revenues.

RSA breach

While at RSA, Castignola created and led the customer response programme during the infamous RSA SecurID breach in March 2011. The attack involved hackers sending out phishing emails to two targeted sets of RSA employees, which contained a malware-laden Microsoft Excel file.

Open opening, the malware exploited a vulnerability in Adobe Flash, which then allowed the attackers to use Poison Ivy RAT to gain access and control of RSA machines and servers.

The attackers were targeting a particular RSA server that stored the seed keys which form a key component of its SecureID tokens.

Access to these would give hackers the potential to clone the tokens and provide the opportunity to bypass two-factor authentication solutions, ultimately enabling access to an untold range of private data from around the world.

Castignola, then RSA’s head of North American sales, played a key role in the aftermath of the incident, leading a large team of almost 90 staff which helped advise customers on how to take protective measures through one-to-one phone calls with each of RSA’s customers, as extensively documented by Wired.

With this amongst the experiences in his locker, Delinea president Rick Hanson said Castignola is well positioned to tackle the increased market demand for PAM solutions.

“I’m proud to bring Dave onboard to lead Delinea’s global sales strategy as we focus on meeting the needs of our customers on their evolving PAM journeys,” Hanson said.

“Dave has proven how to build best-in-class go-to-market organisations that successfully address high-growth market opportunities, such as what we’re seeing with the increased demand for privileged access management solutions that reduce risk, complexity, and costs.”