Speaker – Mr Brandon Wales

Mr Brandon Wales

Executive Director
USA Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

Biography

Brandon Wales is the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) first Executive Director, serving as the senior career executive helping oversee execution of CISA operations. He is responsible for leading long-term strategy development, managing CISA-wide policy initiatives and ensuring effective operational collaboration across the Agency.

From November 17, 2020 through July 12, 2021, he was designated as the Acting Director of CISA. In this capacity, Wales oversaw CISA’s efforts to defend civilian networks, manage systemic risk to national critical functions, and work with stakeholders to raise the security baseline of the Nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure. During his tenure as the acting Director, he led the agency’s response to the SolarWinds Orion Supply Chain Attacks, Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, Pulse Connect Secure vulnerabilities, and the Kaseya VSA supply chain ransomware attack, among many others, while seeing the Agency through the final phase of the CISA 2020 Agency re-organization.