Full Name
Bradford Willke
Job Title
Assistant Director (Acting)
Company
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
Speaker Bio
Bradford Willke serves as the Assistant Director (Acting) for Stakeholder Engagement, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). He leads the Agency's strategic relationship formation and management for its stakeholders, partners, and customers. His team provides a "front door" to customers looking for CISA's capacity building and risk reducing products and services; and his programs convene industry, state and local government, academic, and non- profit partners to channel common goals and objectives into meaningful community of interest outcomes to manage national risk.

During his ten plus years with DHS, he served as the Senior Advisor for stakeholder engagement – instrumental in unifying strategic and operational efforts to deliver cyber preparedness, risk mitigation and incident response activities, and in aligning cyber security resources, governance, and policy analysis to the needs of critical infrastructure and state and local government. Mr. Willke also was the Eastern U.S. Supervisory Cyber Security Advisor (CSA) and Chief of CSA Field Operations. Before joining DHS, Mr. Willke led field studies and research projects in cyber security for more than 10 years while in the Software Engineering Institute’s CERT® Division. Three of his proudest achievements while at CERT were in creating the OCTAVETM suite of information security risk assessments, in leading the DHS cyber investigative efforts related to the 2003 Northeast U.S. Power Outage and in drafting all of the key cyber findings in the joint DOE-DHS final “Black Out” report, and in developing the Cyber Resilience Review – a practical evaluation method based on the CERT Resilience Management Model TM.

Mr. Willke was a law enforcement specialist in the United States Air Force. His recognized skills with IT networks, database design and programming, and security management resulted in becoming his unit’s IT operations and cyber security manager – a position previously reserved for more senior personnel.

Mr. Willke completed the Senior Executive Fellows program, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Executive Education. He holds a master’s degree in Legal Studies, specializing in Homeland Security, from California University of Pennsylvania, a professional certificate in Information Protection and Security from the University of New Haven, a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems Technologies from Southern Illinois University, and an associate degree in Criminal Justice from the Community College of the Air Force.