Andy Bennet

Andy Bennett is a boot wearin’, straight shootin’ native Texan with a heart for service and a history of contribution and commitment to the information and cybersecurity community. Andy is an accomplished professional with almost 30 years of experience across the public, private and higher education sectors. He is a CISO, a business leader, and a teacher who came up through the technical side. He built his career and a reputation around DFIR. He is most well-known for his work as the Deputy CISO for the State of Texas where he was the incident commander for the successful response to largest coordinated attack against local government in US history, the August 2019 ransomware attack that impacted 23 municipal entities across Texas. He wrote the first version of the “Redbook”, which has been used by countless organizations to build and test their Incident response and disaster recovery plans.

Andy has been a volunteer and contributor to ISSA events going back to 2010, but he went all in when the President of the ISSA Capitol of Texas Chapter in Austin asked him to take over and ensure the chapter did not fail during COVID. Andy became the President of the Austin chapter in February of 2021. The membership had dwindled down to fewer than 15 people attending the online monthly meetings.

Over the next 4 years, under Andy’s leadership and with the support of the amazing chapter Board of Directors he assembled, the chapter rebuilt and is thriving today. Today, each meeting is a quarterly mini-conference with up to 110 attendees, and growing. The membership is a diverse cross section of industries and career levels ranging from college students to CISOs and everything in between.