Cyber Security Summit Announces 2018 Visionary Leadership Award Winners

MINNEAPOLIS, September 18, 2018 (Newswire.com) - The Cyber Security Summit is pleased to announce the names of its largest-ever group of Visionary Leadership Award winners. The Summit has given awards to top leaders in industry, government and academia since 2015. However, this year the awards program was expanded to include a wider array of visionaries. The goal was to recognize innovative people at all levels who help develop and foster strategies to protect critical systems and data.

The 2018 winners are:

Academic Leader Winner: Faisal Kaleem, Metropolitan State University, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Security; MN Cyber, Executive Director

Application Security Winner: Target Product Intelligence team lead by Jennifer Czaplewski, Director

Emerging Technologies Winner: Todd Carpenter, Adventium Labs, Chief Engineer

Global Security Leader Winner: Bradley Brekke, Mayo Clinic, Chief Security Officer (Interim)

Governance Champion Winner: Col. Stefanie Horvath, Minnesota Army National Guard, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Minnesota Department of Military Affairs; Minnesota IT Services, Executive Director Enterprise Services

IT Audit Winner: Steen Fjalstad, Midwest Reliability Organization, Security and Mitigation Principal

Security Awareness Program Winner: Chrysa Freeman, Code42, Manager, Security Governance Risk & Compliance Awareness

Security Operations Winner: Neal Dawson, State of Minnesota, Minnesota IT Services, Vulnerability Management Director

Student Winner: Richard Ketelsen, Metropolitan State University, Student

Visionary Program Leader Winner: Jim O'Conner, Cargill, Chief Information Security Officer

These winners will be recognized at the Visionary Leaders Awards Dinner, hosted on the evening of Oct. 23 in conjunction with the 8^th Annual Cyber Security Summit. Along with recognition for their accomplishments, award recipients will get a brief opportunity to share their innovative strategies with their peers and attendees of the Summit.

Visionary leaders from across the cybersecurity ecosystem were eligible to receive awards, which are known as “Morrie Awards.” The awards are named after Robert Tappan Morris, the American computer scientist who notably created the first computer worm on the internet. He later went on to make significant contributions to computer networking as well as co-found the funding firm Y Combinator and become a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For more information on the Cyber Security Summit and the Visionary Leadership Awards, go to cybersecuritysummit.org.

About Cyber Security Summit

Cyber Security Summit was founded in 2011 to spark a conversation around the topic of security. Since that time, it has annually brought together leaders from industry, government and academic interests to improve the state of cybersecurity. Cyber Security Summit 2018 will be hosted Oct. 22-24 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. This year, the Summit has also partnered with ASIS International to bring a version of the event to Las Vegas during the final two days of the Global Security Exchange (Sept. 23-27).

Source: Cyber Security Summit