Leon Rishniw

As of September 2023, Leon Rishniw is founding Chief Information Security Officer of 1Fort, a cyber insurtech that simplifies and automates how mid-to-large businesses obtain cyber insurance.

Career path

Rishniw spent more than 25 years in engineering before moving into insurance technology, building his background at cybersecurity vendors. He served as an engineering leader at Cloudmark, which was acquired by Proofpoint in 2017, and at Qadium, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019. Coalition described him as having led engineering teams at Expanse and Cloudmark before joining the company.

In February 2019, Coalition hired Rishniw, previously Head of Engineering at Qadium/Expanse, as its own first Head of Engineering.
At Coalition, he led development of what the company called the first data-driven cyber insurance platform. Coalition said the hire came as it planned to triple the size of its engineering and incident response team over the following year, drawing in part on the new funding round it announced at the same time.

In September 2023, Rishniw joined 1Fort's leadership team as founding Chief Information Security Officer, moving from his engineering role at Coalition.

Remit at 1Fort

As founding CISO, Rishniw leads 1Fort's security initiatives and strategy. He is also a contributor to 1Fort's partnerships with retail brokerages, work intended to help those brokerages simplify and automate the cyber insurance process for mid-to-large clients. 1Fort has pointed to Rishniw's addition as part of its commitment to security and data privacy standards, noting that the company achieved SOC 2 Type 2 compliance with no qualifications earlier in the year he joined.

Describing his move to the company, Rishniw said, "I'm excited to join the 1Fort team because of the great people and the valuable service we're building."