Phyllis A. Schneck, Ph.D. CS '98
Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer, Northrop Grumman Corporation

Biography

Dr. Phyllis Schneck is vice president and chief information security officer (CISO) for Northrop Grumman. In this role, she oversees the company’s global cybersecurity strategy and policies and is responsible for the digital security of the company’s products, services and infrastructures.

Schneck has 20 years of government and private-sector experience in senior cybersecurity positions. She joined Northrop Grumman in 2019 from Promontory, a division of IBM, where she led the firm’s cybersecurity practice as managing director and global leader of Cyber Solutions.

Prior to her tenure with Promontory, Schneck served as the deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity and communications for the Department of Homeland Security, where she led responses to cybersecurity threats against corporations, civilians and the government. During this time, she led the defensive cybersecurity operational mission to mitigate and respond to cyber threats across the federal civilian government and private sector. She supported the department’s mission of strengthening the security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure, working with all areas of the department, government agencies, law enforcement and the private sector. Schneck led the transformation of signature technology applying analytics to the central cyber protection that the DHS provides to civilian agencies.

Schneck also served as chief technology officer for the global public sector at McAfee, where she was responsible for products and services used by governments to counter global cyber threats and maintain industrial and telecommunications security. She led the development of the firm’s crowdsourced real-time cyber threat intelligence and analytics used to protect critical infrastructure, played a key role in developing McAfee’s cybersecurity policy position, and on several occasions, testified before Congress on cybersecurity technology and policy.

Schneck was a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Commission on Cybersecurity as part of the 44th President’s administration. She was chairman of the board of directors of the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, a partnership between corporations, government and law enforcement for using cyber analysis to combat international cybercrime. Schneck was also vice chairman of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s advisory board on information security and privacy, and she served for eight years as national chairman of the board of directors of the FBI’s public-private InfraGard program. She has briefed and worked with several foreign governments to form partnerships with the U.S. for information sharing, infrastructure protection, and cybersecurity. Schneck holds several information-security and technology patents. Dr. Schneck is also a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Schneck earned her doctorate in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as both a master’s in computer science and a bachelor’s in computer science and mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. In 2020, Schneck was an Inductee into the Georgia Tech College of Computing Hall of Fame.

Northrop Grumman is a technology company, focused on global security and human discovery. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with capabilities they need to connect, advance and protect the U.S. and its allies. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers’ toughest problems, our 90,000 employees define possible every day.

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