Summary
Rafael Silva is a founder and security leader with over two decades of hands-on experience in offensive information security, from penetration testing and malware analysis to threat modeling and phishing simulations. He founded El Pescador, Brazil’s leading educational phishing platform, which was acquired by KnowBe4 in 2019, and went on to lead InfoSec and LATAM operations at KnowBe4 before founding KonaSense, an AI-focused security and governance startup. His background includes heading Offensive Security for the Brazilian Air Force and teaching postgraduate courses in information security, giving him a rare combination of operational, advisory, and academic perspectives. Rafael is an early AI tinkerer and builds people-first tooling that brings real-time visibility and policy enforcement to browser, copilot, and agentic workflows. He’s a seasoned conference speaker and media-recognized researcher who also has roots in Unix/sysadmin work and large-scale infrastructure, which informs his pragmatic approach to securing complex environments. Based in Tampa, he blends entrepreneurial drive with deep technical craft, often finding creative offensive-security techniques to harden defenses.
11 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor in Street, Bachelor in Street at LIFE!
Portuguese, English, Spanish