BreachRx Announces 2026 Rex Awards Recognizing the Most Influential Leaders in Cyber Incident Response
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BreachRx, the leader in cyber incident response management (CIRM), today announced the recipients of the cybersecurity industry's first awards dedicated exclusively to excellence in cyber incident response. Selected from hundreds of accomplished executives, researchers, and legal experts, the 2026 honorees represent the individuals redefining how organizations prepare for, lead, and recover from today’s most complex cyber incidents. Only a select group of recipients are recognized, making the Rex Awards one of the cybersecurity industry's most exclusive honors dedicated to incident response.
As cyber incidents become faster, more disruptive, and increasingly driven by AI, incident response has evolved into one of the most critical disciplines in enterprise security. The Rex Awards recognize leaders who are pushing that discipline forward through operational excellence, strategic leadership, technical innovation, and legal expertise.
“The people who lead organizations through cyber crises rarely receive the recognition they deserve,” said Andy Lunsford, Co-Founder and CEO of BreachRx. “Every major incident demands extraordinary leadership, bringing together security, legal, privacy, communications, and executives, often under immense pressure. The Rex Awards recognize the individuals who have transformed incident response into a true enterprise discipline and are defining what excellence looks like for the rest of the industry."
Modern incident response now extends well beyond containment. Security teams still need speed and technical precision, but legal, privacy, communications, IT, executives, and business leaders must also make coordinated decisions under compressed timelines. The Rex Awards recognize individuals helping organizations meet that challenge through stronger execution, clearer leadership, and more resilient response models.
Recipients were selected by the Rex Awards Committee following evaluations of documented contributions to the practice of incident response, operational leadership, innovation, and measurable industry impact.
Incident Response Excellence
The Incident Response Excellence category recognizes professionals delivering high‑impact incident response programs with proven operational results.
- Jes Johnson, Staff Security Engineer (IR) at Greenlight
Jes rebuilt Greenlight’s incident response capability around automated digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) workflows, with measurable impact on mean time to contain. The work reduces manual intervention at the point of containment where fraud automation is accelerating the volume and velocity of attacks in the fintech industry. - Michael Sikorski, CISO at Coinbase
Michael has consistently advanced cybersecurity incident response by pushing the state of the art in threat intelligence and malware analysis to support response at scale. He is the author of Practical Malware Analysis, which has helped train incident responders around the globe. He also testified before Congress on the role of AI in cyber defense, strengthening the industry’s ability to anticipate, respond to, and recover from evolving threats. - Leroy Ranel, Senior Manager of Cyber Defense Operations at King & Spalding
Leroy leads Global Security Operations at King & Spalding, where he has built a defense model that treats cyber, digital fraud, and 3rd party threats as a single discipline. His unique approach brings investigative structure to incidents that most organizations address reactively
Incident Response Visionary
The Incident Response Visionary category highlights leaders whose strategic work and public voice are reshaping how the industry prepares for and manages complex cyber incidents.
- Charles Carmakal, CTO at Mandiant
Charles has been at the vanguard of defending against global threat actors, including nation states and emerging attacks such as AI‑driven social engineering and extortion campaigns. He has given organizations a practical roadmap for neutralizing threat actor campaigns and broad global compromises before they escalate into national security events. - Alicia Laing Clarke, CISO at PPC Partners Inc.
Alicia translates cybersecurity risk into strategic business outcomes. As a respected voice in the Atlanta CISO community, she champions cyber resilience and risk management as business enablers. By aligning incident response and risk management with business objectives, she ensures operational continuity and long-term enterprise value growth across PPC Partners’ portfolio of companies. - Bill Brown, CISO at Abacus Insights
Bill has built a cybersecurity program that prioritizes enablement over restriction, integrating security principles that support innovation and agility across the organization. Drawing on a strong track record of security leadership, he promotes a pragmatic approach to risk management that emphasizes resilience, usability, and trust. - Chris Collins, Global Director of Cybersecurity
Chris brings a national security background to the commercial challenge of protecting a logistics network spanning more than 100 countries. He has tied security investment directly to modernization efforts, making infrastructure upgrades serve a dual purpose—operational improvement and reduced attack surface—so the security program is treated as a growth enabler rather than a cost center. - Esteban Gutierrez, CISO & VP, Information Security at New Relic
Esteban was recognized for his innovative leadership in mandating direct customer outreach as a core component of the breach lifecycle. He is an advocate of the 'Transparency-First' incident response approach. By integrating security context directly into his development roadmap, he ensures that New Relic remains a model of how organizations can maintain customer trust through radical accountability.
Incident Response Master of the Storm
The Incident Response Master of the Storm category honors those whose legal, regulatory, and policy work helps organizations make sound, defensible decisions during complex data breach and cyber crisis scenarios.
- Antony Kim, Partner at Latham & Watkins
Tony is recognized for his ability to distill complex nation-state, ransomware, and insider attacks into 'clear, calm advice' for the C-suite and Board. By guiding enterprises through the risk management and regulatory landmines across FTC, AG, and SEC investigations, he ensures that the legal response to a breach is as precise and effective as the technical remediation. - Daniel Solove, Bernard Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law at George Washington University Law School
Professor Solove’s privacy taxonomy has become foundational reference material for regulators and incident response practitioners, shaping how the legal community frames data breach response before, during, and after incidents. His recent focus on AI‑driven data crises and the human dimensions of cybersecurity reflects scholarship that stays close to where the field is actually moving.
Incident Response Team Builder
The Incident Response Team Builder category honors leaders who have cultivated high-performing IR teams, empowering them to respond to cyber crises with speed, coordination, and resilience.
- Michael Piacente, Managing Partner at Hitch Partners
Michael is known as the 'CISO Whisperer' and talent architect of the security industry. Having placed over 100 top-tier security leaders, his presence is felt daily through the elite teams that now defend the world’s most targeted organizations.
Elevating Incident Response in the AI Era
The Rex Awards were created to celebrate the people shaping one of cybersecurity’s fastest-evolving disciplines. As AI accelerates the speed, scale, and complexity of cyber incidents, BreachRx believes incident response leadership deserves the same level of recognition long afforded to threat research, product innovation, and executive leadership. While incidents are inevitable, chaos doesn’t have to be.
BreachRx’s newly launched Rex Platform™ is an agentic AI incident command center that helps organizations coordinate response across security, IT, legal, communications, privacy, and executive leadership. Rex brings workflow-aware AI into the incident system of record, helping teams clarify ownership, adapt playbooks, track obligations, document decisions, and maintain control as AI‑accelerated incidents and simultaneous events evolve.
Get Mythos-Ready. Learn more at breachrx.com.
About BreachRx
BreachRx offers the Rex Platform, an agentic AI platform that helps enterprises respond to cyber incidents and other disruptive events. As AI-driven threats increase the volume, speed, and simultaneity of incidents, organizations are now facing a continuous state of disruption. Enterprise response is even more mission-critical and Rex elevates incident response to a coordinated, enterprise-wide capability spanning security, IT, legal, communications, and executive leadership. The platform provides intelligent agents to manage the response, clarify ownership, adapt playbooks, and coordinate stakeholders as incidents evolve. Organizations can manage scale, reduce chaos, and maintain control under pressure. The result is faster, more consistent response, less chaos, and confident, defensible decisions at scale.
Media Contact:
Susie Dougherty for BreachRx
BreachRx@marketbridge.com
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