Binary Defense Names Dr. Aaron Estes Chief Product Officer to Drive the Future of AI-Powered Security Operations

Dr. Estes will drive Binary Defense's vision for an agentic SOC that makes human analysts faster and sharper, building on the momentum of NightBeacon CMD and NightBeacon Stealth.

CLEVELAND – September 8, 2026 – Binary Defense, the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider behind the NightBeacon agentic SOC platform, today named Dr. Aaron Estes as Chief Product Officer. The promotion puts the architect of the company's AI product strategy in charge of a single question: what the security operations center becomes when AI takes on the volume and people make the calls that matter most.

Estes moves up after joining as Vice President of Product in November 2025. In that stretch he turned Binary Defense's AI and automation roadmap into shipping products. As CPO, the mandate gets bigger and it points forward. Build the SOC the next decade of threats will demand: AI that makes human analysts faster and sharper, and defenses that turn the attacker's own AI into a liability. Through all of it, the human stays in command.

“Aaron is truly a visionary in this space, he sees where security operations needs to go, and where it needs to head towards before the market does, and then him and his team goes and builds it,” said Dave Kennedy, Founder and CEO of Binary Defense. “The next few years belong to teams that get the human and the AI working as one instead of fighting for the wheel. That is the company Aaron is helping us build. NightBeacon CMD and Stealth are the first stages of our broader vision to reimagine the SOC for a world dominated by AI-powered threats .”

That vision is already shipping. NightBeacon CMD is the SOC platform Binary Defense built to run its own operations, now in the hands of customers who decide who operates it. It pairs human instinct with AI speed, and the roadmap under Estes pushes the agentic layer to take on more of the investigation and response grunt work, so analysts can spend their time making decisions instead of triaging alerts.

NightBeacon Stealth takes on a threat most of the market is still ignoring: attackers who now run reconnaissance and intrusions on AI. Stealth is the endpoint agent that turns that against them. It uses deception and malware disruption to feed automated attack tooling false signals, break AI-driven reconnaissance, and stall LLM-powered intrusions before they find a foothold. As adversaries lean harder on automation, Stealth is how Binary Defense makes that automation their weakness instead of their edge.

“My job is making sure delivery works for every client we have, which means I lean hard on the product Dave Kennedy, Aaron and his team built. NightBeacon has earned that trust by consistently enabling the outcomes our clients need,” said Jason Vest, Chief Technology Officer of Binary Defense.

Estes brings more than 25 years in software engineering and cybersecurity, including nearly two decades at Lockheed Martin, where he was named a three-time Lockheed Martin Fellow, the highest honor the company gives its top engineers. He later served as CEO of Ironwood Cyber, where his team built a SaaS penetration-testing platform for continuous, scalable security testing. He is an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University and the University of California, Berkeley, teaching graduate cybersecurity courses he designed, and he holds a Doctor of Engineering in Software Security and a Master of Science in Software Engineering, both from SMU.

“Defenders do not need one more tool that adds noise. They need an ally that thinks, and an edge for when the attacker brings AI of their own,” said Dr. Aaron Estes, Chief Product Officer of Binary Defense. “The future of AI security operations runs on two fronts. NightBeacon CMD puts AI to work for the analyst, and Stealth turns the attacker's own automation into a trap. The human stays in command on both, and we are going to build it faster than anyone expects.”