Jerry Bessette

Jerry Bessette is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Cyber Defense Labs, a cybersecurity based in Dallas, Texas where he leads operational efforts and client delivery.

He has previously served as COO at a Digital Forensics company as well as a Senior Vice President with Booz Allen Hamilton where he led readiness, resiliency, and incident response for their commercial clients. His teams have addressed the full incident lifecycle, including pre-incident preparation, tabletop exercises, incident response, threat actor negotiation, and post-incident remediation. Jerry has led response efforts on numerous major ransomware attacks and helped Fortune 500 clients understand and address emerging threats.

Jerry retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after a 24-year career as a special agent and executive manager. In his last assignment, he served as chief of the technical operations section for the FBI cyber division, where he managed the national cyber incident response team and technical operations. He also led the FBI investigation into the 2014 cyber-attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Jerry is a certified information security manager (CISM). a certified chief information security officer (CISO), and he began his professional career as a United States Marine Corps Officer.