CyberOwl Promotes Russell Kempley to Chief Executive

[By: CyberOwl]

CyberOwl, a DNV company, and a global leader in cybersecurity operations for maritime and offshore assets, has appointed Russell Kempley as Chief Executive Officer. Kempley joined in 2020 as Chief Security Officer and most recently served as Chief Propositions Officer. He took up the role in August 2026, succeeding co-founder Daniel Ng, who is stepping down to start a new venture but remains a Strategic Advisor.

The appointment is part of a wider expansion of CyberOwl’s leadership as shipping enters the next phase of vessel and operational technology cybersecurity maturity:

Reflecting on the state of maritime cyber security, Kempley said “most shipowners have produced a cyber plan. Far fewer can show that it is actually working, or evidence it consistently across a mixed fleet.” Kempley added: “IACS E26 has made that gap impossible to ignore, because it effectively splits fleets into ships designed for cyber and ships that were not. As connectivity matures, operators also want these systems to integrate with everything else on board rather than adding another thing to manage. Closing that gap is the defining problem of the next three years.”

Under Kempley, CyberOwl will pursue three priorities:

CyberOwl’s platform now processes more than 750 million security events a day from vessels under way. In August, Anglo-Eastern Ship Management announced CyberOwl as its fleet-wide cyber partner, standardising monitoring, incident response and compliance reporting across more than 720 vessels managed for over 100 shipowners. In June, The Swedish Club partnered with CyberOwl and DNV Cyber to bring threat intelligence to around 1,000 insured vessels.

“CyberOwl has grown significantly over the last two years. Shipowners are now asking us for one place to see cyber risk across a fleet and one team to act on it, no matter what firewall, endpoint detection and response technology or managed IT service provider they use,” said Antonio Cassidy, Director of Services. “Delivering that across thousands of vessels at once is an operations problem before it is a technology problem. The work now is scaling the service without losing the maritime expert judgement that makes it worth having.”

“We see shipowners increasingly focused on how solutions can be operationalised in practice, at scale and managed effectively across mixed fleets,” said Ng. “Russell has led the strategy behind the expansion of our products and services. It’s this strength in experience that will ensure CyberOwl continues to be the preferred vessel cybersecurity partner to shipowners worldwide. I am excited to see how he and the wider CyberOwl team, in lockstep with DNV, shape the future.”

“What comes next is different work,” Kempley added. “Dan built the category; the job now is depth of service, breadth of coverage, and the unglamorous reliability operators expect from anything they depend on every day. The changes to the leadership team bring together depth across cybersecurity, shipping systems and the operational reality of delivering vessel cybersecurity outcomes.”

Kempley will host a fireside discussion with Matthias Becker of Anglo-Eastern at DNV’s event during SMM in Hamburg, 1–4 September 2026.

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