Career profile
Tim Bandos
Field CISO, Critical Start
- Role as of 1 January 2025, the date of the latest source
- Not stated in the sources
As of 2025, Tim Bandos is the Field CISO of Critical Start, a role in which he works on advancing the company's MDR and risk-reduction services for customers.
Career path
Bandos spent over a decade at DuPont, a Fortune 100 company, where he served as Director of Cybersecurity and led the incident response and threat intelligence team, setting the strategic direction for the company's threat analysis capabilities.
He joined Digital Guardian in 2016 as Director of Cybersecurity and built the company's Managed Detection and Response program, which grew to monitor more than one million endpoints for cyberthreat activity.
Bandos went on to serve as Chief Information Security Officer and VP of Managed Security Services at Digital Guardian for six years.
In February 2022, he joined Xcitium as Executive Vice President of SOC Services, a move intended to strengthen the company's threat detection and incident response services.
At Xcitium he was later appointed Chief Information Security Officer, combining the CISO title with his executive vice president role at the company.
He subsequently moved to Critical Start, where he holds the title of Field CISO and has presented on closing visibility gaps across IT and OT environments, including log ingestion failures and automated asset discovery.
Public engagement and published work
Bandos has educated security professionals through speaking sessions at major industry conferences, including RSA and Black Hat.
At a SecureWorld West session, he addressed how missed signals, shadow IT, and unmonitored assets can undermine detection and response efforts, and discussed tactics such as tooling audits and continuous log monitoring to close security gaps.
He has also contributed writing to SecurityWeek, including the piece Four Things Your CISO Wants Your Board to Know.
On joining Xcitium, Bandos said, "I am thrilled to join the team at Xcitium, and to work within an organization with such solid technology and stellar industry reputation."
Across his roles, Bandos has been described as providing guidance to other CISOs at major corporations on risk mitigation and cybersecurity best practices.
