Gary Gagnon

Senior Vice President, Chief Security Officer, and Corporate Director of Cybersecurity

Gary Gagnon, a thought leader in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection, is senior vice president and chief security officer (CSO) of The MITRE Corporation. He is also corporate director of cybersecurity. Working closely with MITRE's leadership, Gagnon performs multiple interrelated roles covering the protection of critical assets and information. He directs all aspects of corporate security operations, including information, physical, and special security. He is responsible for developing the company's cybersecurity strategy and executing all cyber work program activities across the company's federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) and all government customers.

Gagnon is a member of the board of directors of the Advanced Cyber Security Center, a Massachusetts-based collaborative research facility that brings together stakeholders from government, industry and academia to address the most critical and sophisticated cybersecurity challenges.

Since 1998, Gagnon has helped pioneer investigative approaches to emerging cyber threats. During the millennium roll-over, he 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. The Cyber Assurance NIC provided the federal government with computer intrusion and malicious code release information from the private sector. Concurrently, he worked with the National Infrastructure Protection Center on strategies to protect the nation against a cyber attack. Notably, he worked with a team that formulated the technology to investigate the earliest large-scale denial of service attack in early 2000, which exposed widespread Internet vulnerabilities.

With MITRE since 1986, Gagnon has held several leadership positions focused on solving information security issues for a variety of DoD organizations, including the U.S. Army, the 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.

Gagnon has led MITRE's efforts to help set and communicate software industry security data standards to fortify vendor products against vulnerabilities. MITRE'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™), help government and private industry develop protections for data and information.

Prior to joining MITRE, Gagnon worked for Harris Corporation on a variety of software development projects for the DoD. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Fitchburg State College.