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As the General Manager for the Center for Threat-Informed Defense, Jon Baker is responsible for the Center’s strategy and its outcomes as he convenes the global cybersecurity community to advance the state of the art and the practice in threat-informed defense. Jon co-founded the Center as a privately funded research and development organization where he partners with sophisticated cybersecurity teams to systematically advance the global understanding of adversary tradecraft and apply that knowledge to improve the community’s ability to defend against those threats.

Jon has extensive experience leading research teams and collaborating with industry to advance cybersecurity capabilities. Most recently, he led MITRE’s Cyber Threat Intelligence and Adversary Emulation Department where he was responsible for advancing those critical capabilities across MITRE’s work program and overseeing MITRE’s work on CALDERA and MITRE ATT&CK®. Jon led MITRE’s team in the early development of the OASIS STIX and TAXII standards while supporting the Department of Homeland Security. Jon led MITRE’s security automation team through the development of SCAP and managed the CVE team.  He was a cocreator of OVAL, a standard language for describing and checking for the presence of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other endpoint artifacts.

Jon holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Boston University and a Bachelor’s in Psychology from Tufts University.

As the general manager of MITRE ATT&CK Defender™, Chriss Knisley leads the team responsible for MITRE Engenuity’s new training and certification offering built to change the game in threat-informed defense. MAD provides cybersecurity defenders with free video-based training on the effective use of ATT&CK and certifies their mastery through an innovative subscription-based certification program. We’re helping to fill the cybersecurity skills gap with threat-informed defenders, and certifying elite defenders in their knowledge of using ATT&CK in their daily jobs.

Chriss Knisley has more than 20 years of software industry experience in development, product management, sales and marketing. Prior to joining the MITRE Engenuity Team, Chriss served as the President and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Haystax Technology where he led the software development, product management and marketing of Haystax’s industry-leading security analytics platform, Constellation Analytics Platform. Constellation is a robust, multi-tenant, multi-model AI and workflow platform that can be deployed on premises or in the cloud to combine multiple disparate data sets to understand insider threat risk.

He joined Haystax from IBM, where he held several product, business development, and sales leadership positions within IBM’s Smarter Cities (now Safer Planet) division working on intelligence analysis, counter-fraud, and policing programs. He joined IBM through the acquisition of i2 where he led the product teams for both the COPLINK policing products and the i2 Analysis products including the pioneering visual link analysis product, i2 Analyst’s Notebook.

Knisley holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Syracuse University, where, as a student and employee, he led efforts to create some of the first interactive, multimedia and data-driven Web sites and Web-based applications in the world.

As General Manager, Ashwin runs ATT&CK Evaluations, equipping the information security community with objective data evaluating the technology and people associated with building a holistic, threat informed defense. He is continually working to expand the scope of Evaluations, branching out to all aspects of the threat informed security process, with a focus on delivering valuable data for end-users to  make the most informed decision possible when selecting tools and capabilities to protect their environment.

Ashwin has been in the information security space since 2017, serving as the Lead Product Manager for multiple products/platforms, spanning from Threat Intelligence Platforms to Detection and Response products.  Throughout this experience, Ashwin focused heavily on building towards the ATT&CK Framework and improving threat informed defense capabilities within his products. Additionally, he worked in enterprise sales, resulting in interfacing with 1000s of CTI analysts, SOC analysts, Directors, and CISOs in a variety of different sectors and geographical regions.

Prior to his information security experience, Ashwin worked in investment banking and venture capital, informing his focus on running organizations and analyzing the industry at large.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a Minor in Marketing from University of California, Riverside, and a Master of Business Administration in International Business from St. Mary’s University, Twickenham in London, with additional coursework taken at Oxford.