MITRE Appoints Gary Gagnon to Cyber Security Role

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

BEDFORD, Mass., and MCLEAN, Va., April 26, 2010 — The MITRE Corporation's President and CEO, Alfred Grasso, has announced the appointment of vice president Gary Gagnon as corporate director of cyber security. In this newly formed position, Gagnon will work closely with MITRE's leadership to develop and implement MITRE's overall cyber security strategy and cyber work program activities performed for all government customers. In addition, he will be responsible for MITRE's internal cyber security program and the use of company systems as a test bed for providing recommended actions to government customers.

"An increased focus and coordinated approach on cyber security and assurance underlie successful outcomes for all of our government customers," said Grasso. "Gary brings a wealth of experience in cyber, and he will make sure that we're delivering the strategies that enable our customers to effectively deal with advanced cyber threats."

In establishing this new position, MITRE is taking an unprecedented approach on cyber security research and development. Rather than have separate organizations with separate leadership for internal and customer programs, MITRE is appointing Gagnon to oversee both cyber portfolios. In doing so, the company is able to integrate its own infrastructure protection efforts with ongoing cyber work for government customers.

Gagnon, who joined MITRE in 1986, has more than 25 years of experience in the field of computer security and critical infrastructure protection, serving a broad range of federal government agencies. He has helped pioneer investigative approaches to emerging cyber threats since 1998. Notably, he worked with a team that formulated the technology to investigate the earliest large-scale denial of service attack in early 2000—an attack that exposed widespread Internet vulnerabilities.

During the millennium roll-over, Gagnon led a team of experts from 24 private sector companies in support of the Cyber Assurance National Information Center (NIC) for the Y2K Information Coordination Center, which provided the federal government with computer intrusion and malicious code release information from the private sector.

In addition, Gagnon has held several leadership positions within MITRE where he concentrated on solving information security issues for a variety of Department of Defense organizations, including the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and the National Security Agency (NSA). As part of this work, he investigated technologies such as intrusion detection systems, firewall technology, computer forensics, and virtual private networks, as well as "NSA-Grade" quality security countermeasures.

Concurrent with his cyber security responsibilities, Gagnon serves as a vice president in the Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems within MITRE's Department of Defense Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence FFRDC. In this role, he focuses on support to the U.S. intelligence agencies, military intelligence organizations, and the combatant commanders, with a particular emphasis on cyber issues within the Intelligence Community.

MITRE has been a leader in helping government and industry in developing standards that give information technology vendors a common platform for defining and guarding against software vulnerabilities. The company's open source programs, including Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE®), Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL®), Common Platform Enumeration (CPE™), and Common Configuration Enumeration (CCE™), are widely used tools to protect data and information.

About The MITRE Corporation

The MITRE Corporation (www.mitre.org) is a not-for-profit organization that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security, with principal locations in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va.

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