Chris Gibson is the executive director of FIRST, bringing with him a wealth of relevant and up-to-date experience in setting up and managing CERTs at the very highest levels of the worldwide Information and Cyber Security community.
Chris spent over 12 years working in the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) whilst at Citigroup and, for 10 years, has been among FIRST’s executive leaders, including 2 yearsas Chair. Within FIRST he implemented the Fellowship program, which was created to fund CERTs from UN-designated “Least Developed Nations” (LDCs) allowing them both to join FIRST and attend conferences and training.
Chris joined the UK Government's CERT-UK team in November 2013 to build and launch the UK’s first formally chartered national CERT, joined Close Brothers as Chief Information Security Officer in November 2016, moved to Orwell Group as CISO in Jul 2018 and joined FIRST as it’s Executive Director in May 2019.
Chris’ experience has allowed him to work with colleagues from both inside some of the world’s largest global financial institutions with the complexities that brings and also with colleagues from the incident response community, with members ranging from Microsoft and Oracle through to the national CERTs of Azerbaijan and Indonesia.