Professional Biography

David M. Piscitello has over forty years of experience with data and telecommunications networks and security. As a network architect at Unisys Corporation and Member of Technical Staff for Bell Communications Research, Dave was involved in the design of network and routing protocols, network  interfaces, and public switched services (ATM, Frame Relay, SMDS).

As founder and principal consultant of Core Competence, Inc., Dave developed security architectures for secure extranets, intranet  data centers, and secure remote access forsmall-to-medium businesses as well as Fortune 500 and large organizations including Chase Bank, Cisco Systems, DuPont Corporation, and the OECD. He has served on technical advisory boards for emerging security and broadband technology companies including A10 Networks, CoRadiant, CoSine Communications, Covad, Foundstone, IntruVert, and Watchguard Technologies. Dave has accumulated a wealth of experience with virtual private networking (SSL, IPsec), intrusion detection, firewall, secure email, application proxy, web server, wireless security, identity management and other security systems.

Dave served on the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) of the Internet Corporation for Addresses, Names, and Numbers (ICANN), where under the direction of Dr. Stephen Crocker, Dave was the principal author of over 30 SSAC reports and advisories. He later served as ICANN’s Vice President, Security, where he created a program and provided DNS investigations training to Europol, Interpol, and law enforcement agencies in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. He was instrumental in the creation of ICANN’s DAAR system for studying and reporting on domain name registration and security threats (domain abuse) across top-level domain (TLD) registries.

David is a co-author of three books, including Understanding Voice over IP Security, and contributed to the 2007 Internet Governance publication, The Power of Ideas: Internet Governance in a Global Multi -stakeholder Environment. He is a past member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group of the IETF. has published several hundred articles and white papers on networking and security, and has written several Internet RFCs.

Dave is a member of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy expert community and served as an invited participant in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Security Expert Group. He serves on the Antiphishing Working Group (APWG) and Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) Boards of Directors. He received the M3AAWG Mary Litynski Award for a Lifetime of Fighting DNS and Online Abuse in 2019.

Dave Piscitello is a partner at Interisle Consulting Group and directs Interisle’s Cybercrime Information Center project. Dave has published hundreds of invited or freelance articles during his career, in print and online magazines, academic journals and industry forum publications. He has published books on various Internet technologies, including Understanding Voice over Internet Protocol Security (April 2006) and Open Systems Networking – TCP/IP and OSI. Dave continues to publish articles on cybersecurity, cybercrime, and DNS at Interisle Insights. Dave’s insightful and entertaining info blog, The Security Skeptic, was mentioned as “A blog worth visiting” in Network World’s Security Newsletter, and was nominated for a 2013 Security Bloggers Award for Most Educational Security Blog.

Dave received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Villanova University.

Work hard at something you love among people you trust. 
Watch those you do not trust from a distance.