Speakers

Gharun Lacy is a cybersecurity and national security executive with more than 25 years of experience leading global teams, managing multimillion-dollar operations, and protecting some of the world's most complex organizations against cyber, geopolitical, and physical threats.

He currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Cyber and Technology Security at the U.S. Department of State, where he leads a 430-person global organization responsible for protecting U.S. foreign policy operations across more than 170 countries and 270 facilities worldwide. He oversees a $136M operating budget and influences approximately $275M in annual security investment.

Throughout his career, Gharun has built organizations that thrive under pressure. He is best known for translating nation-state risk into business decisions, combining cyber, intelligence, physical security, and geopolitical insight into a unified strategy that protects operations while enabling growth.

Among his most notable achievements, he led the federal response to the PRC Storm-0558 cyber espionage campaign, directing a 60-person interagency task force that resolved the incident in 10 days and drove a government-wide Microsoft logging policy change that saved taxpayers an estimated billions of dollars. He subsequently directed the first-ever federal investigation of NSO Group Pegasus mobile spyware attacks targeting U.S. diplomats, briefing the NSC, DOJ, and the Intelligence Community — with findings contributing directly to a White House executive order establishing new deterrence norms for commercial spyware.

Under his leadership, the Department of State reduced cyber incident detection times from days to approximately 11 minutes, lowered breaches by roughly 60%, doubled remediation throughput, and significantly improved the efficiency of a $275M security portfolio.

Gharun has also led major efforts in AI adoption, intelligence modernization, and international cyber collaboration. He serves as a founding member of the Department of State's AI Executive Steering Committee, created the FVEY Cyber Cohort to advance allied cyber defense coordination, and helped deploy one of the federal government's earliest enterprise AI chatbot programs — now accessible to 77,000 global users.

He is frequently featured in Federal News Network, Politico, Nextgov, Semafor, and Billington CyberSecurity, and is widely recognized as a thought leader on cybersecurity, AI, nation-state threats, and geopolitical risk.

Gharun is focused on executive leadership opportunities where he can bring his experience in enterprise resilience, crisis leadership, risk management, and transformation to private-sector companies, boards, and investment portfolios to accelerate business delivery.

U.S. Department of State

The U.S. Department of State is the United States government’s principal foreign affairs agency, responsible for advancing American foreign policy, protecting U.S. citizens abroad, and managing diplomatic relations with more than 180 nations. A $58 billion enterprise with approximately 77,000 employees, the Department operates one of the world’s most complex, globally distributed security environments: 270+ diplomatic facilities spanning 170 countries across every geopolitical threat landscape on earth.

The Bureau of Diplomatic Security — the Department’s security and law enforcement arm — defends personnel, information, and critical infrastructure against threats converging across cyber, physical, and counterintelligence domains. Its Directorate of Cyber and Technology Security leads real-time cyber defense for all Department systems and foreign policy data worldwide, operating at the frontier of nation-state incident response, AI-enabled security operations, and enterprise-scale zero-trust deployment.
 

The adversarial tradecraft State encounters at its diplomatic missions routinely precedes its arrival in the private sector — often by years.