Jerry Bessette

Jerry Bessette leads Booz Allen’s Cyber Incident Response program, which addresses the full incident lifecycle including both pre-incident preparation, incident response, and post-incident remediation.

Prior to joining Booz Allen, Jerry was a managing director with Ankura Consulting, where he managed incident response investigations and proactive services for clients ranging in size from Fortune 15 corporations to small, privately held companies across business areas. Engagements included information security assessments, risk assessments, incident response, and technical services such as penetration testing, vulnerability scans, and tabletop exercises.

Jerry’s specific focus areas include General Data Protection Regulation-related information security matters, National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework-related matters, and New York State Department of Financial Services cybersecurity regulations. He has served as an outsourced chief information security officer (CISO) for several major corporations.

Prior to joining Ankura, Jerry retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after a 24-year career as a special agent and executive manager. He held numerous leadership positions around the country, managing investigations of different criminal and national security violations in addition to technical surveillance programs. In his last assignment, Jerry was a member of the Senior Executive Service in the FBI cyber division, where he was chief of the technical operations section. His team developed threat-agnostic tools to counter the cyber adversary, and he managed the FBI’s national cyber incident response team and overall program. He led the FBI investigation into the 214 cyber attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Jerry is a certified information security manager, certified CISO, and FBI-certified crisis management coordinator. He also holds a SANS Institute global information assurance certification in information security fundamentals and U.S. national intelligence community joint duty certification. He maintains a current Top Secret security clearance. 

He earned a B.S. in civil engineering from the Virginia Military Institute and is a former Marine Corps officer.