agenda

Colonel Michael S. Medgyessy is the Chief Information Officer & Chief Data Officer for the Air Force Intelligence Community. In this role, he is responsible for the architecture, cybersecurity, governance and modernization of the Air Force Intelligence Information Enterprise and ISR mission systems valued at $55B. Col Medgyessy has previously served the President in the White House Communications Agency as the Director of Acquisition and Modernization. He also served as the commander of the 89th Communications Squadron, and the 691st Cyber Operations Squadron. He served in the Joint Special Operations Command, combat communications, Air Operations Center, Network Operations Support Center, MAJCOM and Air Staff positions. He has served duties as Commander, Chief Technology Officer, Director of Operations, communications engineer, and program manager. His career includes deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Charles Zentay is an experienced business executive, specializing in IT and organization transformations. Mr. Zentay’s current role is CIO of Strategy, Planning, and Regulatory at National Grid, a $50 billion+ market cap Fortune 500 company, which delivers electricity and natural gas to over 28 million people in New England and the UK. National Grid’s IT department of approximately 2,000 professionals is investing $4 billion over the next 5 years to create the “connected utility” and a dynamic balancing grid – which supports our transition to a green energy future. In his role, Mr. Zentay leads at team of 150 to develop ITs strategy, planning, and tracking – managing the life cycle of investment from concept through to regulatory filings, funding, implementation and close out. As part of this work, Mr. Zentay designed and is implementing an efficiency program to reduce ITs baseline costs by 25% over 3 years, creating funding for the company’s Digital transformation. Prior to joining National Grid, Mr. Zentay was a leading executive and management consultant, advising senior leaders on IT and organizational transformation, and having served in senior management roles, including interim Chief Transformation Officer of a public technology company, CEO of a specialty finance company, and Chief Operating Officer of an organic dairy company. Mr. Zentay graduated from Duke University and Phillips Exeter Academy and grew up and lives in Washington, D.C.

Kevin Bocek is responsible for security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi. He brings more than 16 years of experience in IT security with leading security and privacy leaders including RSA Security, Thales, PGP Corporation, IronKey, CipherCloud, nCipher, and Xcert. He is sought after for comment by the world’s leading media such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post,Forbes, Fortune, BBC, Süddeutsche Zeitung, USA Today, Associated Press,Guardian, and Telegraph along with security press including SC Magazine, Dark Reading, and Network World. Most recently, Mr. Bocek led the investigation that identified Secretary Hillary Clinton’s email server did not use digital certificates and encryption for the first 3 months of term. Research showed her email could have been read and credentials stolen for long term email monitoring. This groundbreaking research that “went back in time” was made possible using Venafi TrustNet, the world’s first certificate reputation service. In 2013, Mr. Bocek led Venafi’s investigation in to how Edward Snowden used cryptographic keys and digital certificates to breach the NSA. His findings were corroborated by classified memos between the NSA and US Department of Justice. Kevin has successfully deployed authentication and encryption solutions for the world’s most demanding financial institutions, telcos, and government agencies. His early success securing critical systems included designing and engineering cutting-edge Java and smart card–based encryption and PKI applications for the U.S. government. Kevin has authored several books, including PCI Cardholder Data Protection for Dummies and Laptop Encryption for Dummies and co-authored research projects with The Ponemon Institute including the Cost of Data Breach, Cost of Failed Trust, and Worldwide Encryption Trends reports. Mr. Bocek has a B.S. in chemistry from the College of William & Mary and an MBA from Wake Forest University.

Mr. Caron is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) / Assistant Inspector General of Information Technology (AIG/IT) for the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as of May 2021. Mr. Caron has over 24 years of information technology (IT) experience. He began his career in the US Army working in hands-on technical positions serving for 7 years. Previously he has served as the Director of Enterprise Network Management (ENM) within the Directorate of Operations in the Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM) at the Department of State (DOS) since June 2016. Mr. Caron then spent 2 years as a contractor with the federal government, where he acquired more refined technical skills and a more detailed understanding of IT operations. He joined the federal government at the Department of State (DOS) in 2003 as a Systems Administrator. He has held multiple positions at the DOS, moving from managing small technical groups leading up to Director for ENM. One of his most significant accomplishments was acting as the technical liaison during a major cyber security event at the Department. His leadership allowed the Department to resolve the incident as quickly and effectively as possible with minimal impact to the mission. As the Director of ENM, Mr. Caron was personally responsible for the leadership of the largest office within the IRM bureau. This included managing the financial portfolio of over $200 million and prioritization of work across a wide range of disciplines. In this role he was responsible for the network and authentication infrastructure for the Department, led the re-engineering of the Department’s primary Identity and Access Management solution, formed teams to address key security efforts needed to mitigate future potential cybersecurity attacks through collaborative efforts, led the redesign of the Department’s Active Directory significantly improving security and responsible for the engineering and management of all the Department’s global network infrastructure and perimeter security infrastructure. Mr. Caron is a co-chair on the CIO’s Innovation Counsel for Zero Trust as well as co-chair for ATARC.org Zero Trust Working Group. He previously chaired ATARC.org Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) 3.0 Working Group which resulted in 8 vendor proof of concepts being delivered to government participants.

Karen Wrege joined the Department of State, Directorate of Defense Trade Controls in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in 2014 to modernize legacy systems in the Directorate. The Defense Export Control and Compliance System (DECCS) was launched in February 2020. Karen won the Federal 100 award that recognizes individuals that make significant contributions to the US Federal Government using technology for the DECCS system deployment. Prior to her post at the State Department, Ms. Wrege spent ten years in an economic consultancy providing auction software and services to global clients in the telecommunications industry. Before that, Ms. Wrege served as Chief Information Officer of the US Federal Communications Commission's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. Ms. Wrege oversaw software development and implementation of electronic spectrum auctions for the Commission. Since the program inception in 1994, FCC auctions have raised over $200 billion in revenue for the US Treasury.

Charles Garzoni is the Deputy CISO and Staff Vice President of Cyber Defense Operations at Centene Corporation where he manages all aspects of cybersecurity operations. Centene is a fortune 24 managed care organization and the largest Medicaid provider in the U.S. Charles is also a retired senior leader and special agent from the Department of the Air Force, Office of Special Investigations (OSI) where he held numerous leadership positions responsible for conducting and overseeing cyber investigations and operations. Prior to his employment with Centene he was with the FBI Cyber Division where he also held numerous positions impacting cyber investigations, strategy, policy, and operations including being assigned as the Incident Response Director, the Cyber Incident Coordinator, and as the Chief of Threat Analysis at the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF). He was last assigned to the Legislative Branch as the Director of Defensive Strategy for the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission under Senator Angus King and Representative Mike Gallagher, where he helped define the US strategy to combat significant cyber attacks, resulting in over 80 recommendations and legislative proposals to the President of the United States and members of Congress.

Charles Sun is a highly innovative, dynamic, and experienced IT expert and visionary executive with more than two decades of extensive professional and managerial experience in both the public and private sectors, having routinely and consistently provided the state of the art, innovative, and cutting edge IT solutions and project management with a proactive vision and common sense to many organizations in the US. Considered as the IPv6 thought leader in the federal government and a visionary in promoting the global IPv6-only adoption, Mr. Sun has been serving as the Technology Co-Chair of the Federal IPv6 Task Force between 2014 and 2020. In 2017, Mr. Sun was named as one of the Top Ten Influencers for Internet of Things by IT Chronicles. Since 2018, Mr. Sun has been serving as a Columnist for the Homeland Security Today magazine writing articles related to Internet security and the global adoption of IPv6. Mr. Sun previously served as Director of IT at the U.S. EXIM Bank as well as Senior Advisor for Emerging Technologies & IPv6 Transition Program Manager at the U.S. Census Bureau. He also served as Branch Chiefs at U.S. DOC and DOL. Prior to his current work in the federal government, Mr. Sun worked as a senior network engineer & principal network consultant at the University of Maryland, Northrop Grumman, National Library of Medicine, AOL Time Warner, and Georgetown University.

Amy Mushahwar is a partner on the Privacy, Cyber & Data Strategy team. Amy has over 20 years of experience in the technology space and focuses her practice on data security, cyber risk, privacy, and emerging technologies. Amy advises clients on proactive data security practices, data breach incident response, and regulatory compliance. She handles security incidents and has interacted with federal and state agencies and forensic service providers, overseen investigations, and designed post-incident response notification and remediation plans. In addition to her incident response work, Amy provides compliance support on applicable security laws, PCI-DSS, and security audit standards such as NIST. She also facilitates in-depth security incident simulations. Amy regularly advises clients on conducting practical assessments for cyber risk when working with vendors and other business partners, including review of applicable insurance policies and riders. Amy assists clients in compliance with numerous privacy laws, such as the CCPA, TCPA, COPPA, GLBA, and FCRA, as well as in federal and state unfair and deceptive trade practices law pertaining to privacy. Amy counsels clients on the process of digital transformation, implementing technologies such as automation, cloud computing, virtualization, virtualized networking, containerized environments, Big Data (data warehouses and data lakes), and artificial intelligence. Amy is a former technology consultant and chief information security officer (CISO), and previously owned and operated a technology consulting company.

Rex Booth is a White House Senior Policy Advisor and Director of Stakeholder Engagement in the Office of the National Cyber Director. In this role, he develops and executes strategies for national-level engagement with private sector and international stakeholders to pursue a more secure and resilient cyberspace. For over two decades, Rex has focused on the full spectrum of cybersecurity – from secure web development and architecting one of the first in-house SIEMs, to federal enterprise risk management, to incident response against state actors, and now to national and international collaboration and coordination on cyber matters. Prior to joining the Office of the National Cyber Director, Rex served in a variety of leadership roles within the federal government, including the Chief of Cyber Threat Analysis at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISO of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, and Deputy CISO of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Before joining the government, Rex held various positions in the private sector at companies including Mandiant, Grant Thornton, and others. Rex holds degrees in political science, computer science, and technology management. He lives in Alexandria, VA, with his wife and three children.

Stuart Phillips is the product marketing director for cyber at Interos, the leader in operational resilience. He is responsible for working with the CISO community focused on supply chain security. Stuart has over 25 years of experience in cybersecurity, networking, and unified communications. He has worked with end-users worldwide in the military, government, and financial markets, covering all security aspects. Stuart previously held leadership positions with prominent security vendors. He was the owner of a U.S. Air Force sub-contractor for Lockheed Martin developing software to optimize highly degraded military satellite data networks. Stuart completed his B.S. in Computer Science in California and MBA in Singapore and now lives in Seattle, WA