Bob Mechler

Principal Security Strategist, Forcepoint

Bob Mechler is Forcepoint’s Principal Security Strategist. Bob served as Vice President – Strategy, Risk and Programs for Verizon. In this capacity, he was responsible for delivery of information security strategies that protected sensitive data for over 140M customers and $120B in financial transactions. These strategies included data protection, identity management, customer engagement, supplier security, education and awareness, policy and governance. During this time, Bob also served as Chair of the Customer Authentication Steering Committee. He partnered and negotiated with multiple executive teams to eliminate the use of sensitive personal information from call center authentication practices while implementing new technologies to protect customer accounts. Bob was Vice President – Information Security for Verizon. In that role, he established, evolved and managed information security for a complex, global enterprise with over 170K employees, 24K contractors, 70K servers, 500K endpoints, and 3K applications. He led a team of 200 members across multiple disciplines including architecture and engineering, incident response, vulnerability management, security operations, policy and governance, application security, and identity management. Bob helped lead the way for Verizon’s secure use of public cloud computing and mobile device programs. He was also responsible for the standardization of security technology across disparate organizations. Between 1994 – 2012, Bob served as the CISO for Verizon Wireless. Bob holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems Management from Stevens Institute of Technology as well as a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Delaware.