Wireless Threat Intelligence · Santa Cruz, CA
Chris Risley
Your firewall guards the wires. He built a company to guard the air.
Your firewall guards the wires. He built a company to guard the air.
A cell phone left in a server room. A Bluetooth keyboard nobody registered. A rogue radio transmitting from a parking lot. None of it shows up on a firewall, an endpoint agent, or a network log. That blind spot is the entire business of Bastille Networks, and Chris Risley has run it since 2015.
Bastille uses software-defined radio to give security teams something they never had: a live map of every mobile, wireless, and Internet of Things device emitting a signal inside a building. The pitch is blunt. The perimeter most enterprises spent two decades hardening was made of cables and code. The airspace above the desks went undefended.
Risley talks about it the way a plumber talks about a leak you can’t see yet. “Anything that can be controlled wirelessly is vulnerable,” he says, then ties it to the moment: the rise of AI data centers stuffed with billions of dollars of intellectual property, all of it sitting near antennas. His argument is that wireless visibility belongs in the same budget line as the firewall, not in a footnote.
It is a contrarian position, which is the kind of position he tends to take. Long before radio frequency was a board-level worry, he was running the DNS company that telcos used to keep the internet pointed in the right direction, and the DDoS company that absorbed attacks meant to knock websites offline. He arrives early to problems other people haven’t named yet.
“Now is the time for enterprises to start treating wireless visibility and vulnerability management as foundational security infrastructure.”— Chris Risley, CEO, Bastille Networks
Risley has a particular specialty: building security and infrastructure companies that bigger companies want to own. The buyers read like a roll call of enterprise tech.
Read his resume in order and a pattern falls out. Anti-virus and network security at ON Technology, sold to Symantec. E-business plumbing at NewChannel, sold to LivePerson. Then the turnaround that made his name.
He took over Nominum when it was insolvent and rebuilt it into the leading DNS software provider for telcos and service providers - the unglamorous machinery that resolves the names behind every click. The company was later folded into Akamai. From there he chaired StreamBase (sold to TIBCO), ran Digital Reef (sold to TransPerfect), and led Defense.Net, a DDoS-defense outfit that F5 Networks bought.
Each move tracked a threat just before it went mainstream. DNS abuse. Real-time data. Volumetric attacks. And now the wireless spectrum, which he frames not as a novelty but as the next foundational layer. Between gigs he was a managing partner at Seabright Companies, an angel firm, betting early on other founders the way he bets early on threats.
Chairman & CEO of ON Technology, a network security software firm acquired by Symantec.
Becomes CEO of Nominum, turning an insolvent company into the leading DNS provider for telcos.
Leads Digital Reef through its acquisition by TransPerfect.
CEO of Defense.Net, the DDoS-defense firm bought by F5 Networks.
Takes the helm at Bastille Networks, betting on wireless airspace as the new perimeter.
Pushing RF threat intelligence into enterprise, government, and AI data-center security.
“The Dallas hack should serve as a warning that radio frequency is a productive entry point for hackers to carry out far more serious attacks on critical infrastructure.”
“An illicit communications network of this size, timed just as the UN General Assembly convenes, highlights how nation-state adversaries are escalating their efforts to weaponize the wireless spectrum.”
“With the explosion of new AI data centers and other high-value targets worth billions in IP or trade secrets, now is the time to treat wireless visibility as foundational security infrastructure.”
Nine venture-backed startups led - a near-record cadence of CEO seats in enterprise software.
His exits span anti-virus (Symantec), DNS (Akamai), DDoS (F5), and now RF (Bastille).
Before the serial-CEO run, he was a managing partner at Seabright Companies, backing other founders.
He works from Santa Cruz while Bastille is headquartered up the coast in San Francisco.