Frenos Appoints Former KnowBe4 CIO Colin Murphy as Chief Hacking Officer

Security Industry Veteran to Drive Innovation in Critical Infrastructure Protection

Frenos, the autonomous OT security assessment platform, today announced the appointment of Colin Murphy as its Chief Hacking Officer. Murphy brings over a decade of expertise as a recognized cybersecurity researcher, practitioner and technology innovator—including his most recent role as CIO for KnowBe4, where he helped guide the company from startup to its $1 billion unicorn status, IPO and subsequent private equity acquisition. Murphy’s appointment as Chief Hacking Officer marks a return to his roots as an ethical hacker, building on years of red teaming experience alongside the late Kevin Mitnick at Mitnick Security, where he continues to collaborate while delivering on the shared Frenos mission of advancing offensive security innovation and making the digital world a safer place.

"My passion has always been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cybersecurity," Murphy explained. "I'm excited to bring my combined experience as a researcher, operator and builder to help Frenos transform how organizations approach IT/OT security testing in order to defend against the accelerating threats to critical infrastructure.”

In the role of Chief Hacking Officer, Murphy will oversee product engineering and operations, as well as foster the cybersecurity community and continuing research, to ensure the Frenos platform provides significant value to users.

The Frenos vision centers around combining a digital twin with an AI reasoning agent, named SAIRA (Simulated Adversarial Intelligence Reasoning Agent), to continuously simulate adversary and hacker techniques at scale across both IT and OT environments. Traditional hands-on security or penetration testing in OT environments occurs infrequently due to the sensitivity and potential operational impacts of IT tools and techniques, resulting in point in time “paper assessments” or “audits” that leave organizations with a poor understanding of their security posture in their most critical environments. Frenos changes that paradigm by enabling continuous tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) modeling against a digital twin of the operational technology environment, identifying critical exposure pathways and providing tactical proactive risk mitigations that the operator can take action on.

Murphy sees Frenos' digital twin approach as revolutionary for testing sensitive OT environments where traditional penetration testing methods could disrupt operations. "Traditional security assessment, vulnerability and penetration tools cannot be trusted to not impact operational reliability," Murphy stated. "By creating a digital twin, we can model attacks against critical systems with zero impact on operations."

Murphy envisions Frenos becoming an essential tool in every security practitioner's toolkit. "My goal is to help build a platform that helps security teams stay ahead of threat actors by predicting potential attacks rather than just reacting to them. The security industry needs to move from reactive to proactive, and AI gives us the opportunity to finally close that gap."

"Colin brings a wealth of cybersecurity expertise that aligns perfectly with our mission of transforming how critical infrastructure organizations manage their security posture," said Brian Proctor, CEO of Frenos. "His unique combination of hands-on ethical hacking experience, technology strategy and executive leadership will be invaluable as we scale our AI-native platform to autonomously assess and defend the world's most critical environments."

The strategic hire follows Frenos' recent $3.88 million seed funding round led by DataTribe and complements the company's growing advisory board, which includes industrial cybersecurity expert Robert M. Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Dragos.

Click here to meet with the Frenos team at the RSAC™ 2025 Conference, April 28-May 1 in San Francisco, to see a preview of the Frenos 2.0 Platform and learn about the next evolution of OT Security.

About Frenos

Frenos transforms how critical infrastructure teams assess the cybersecurity posture of mission-critical environments, devices, and applications. Our continuous security assessment platform reduces assessment time from months to minutes, with zero impact on operations. By proactively identifying the most effective risk mitigations at scale, Frenos helps companies save time, money, and resources. Discover more at frenos.io.

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