Maria Summicht

Maria Sumnicht serves as the National Cybersecurity Director for Critical Infrastructure with the Task Force on Homeland Security. In this capacity, Maria is responsible for monitoring and providing the Center for Security Policy in Washington DC with information and solutions on the happenings within America’s Critical Infrastructure; both regionally in the State of Colorado and nationally. She presents findings before the U.S. Congress and other regional and local governments provide solutions, policies and governance expertise for America’s critical infrastructure.

In her prior role,  Maria was with New York City Cyber Command as the Urban Technology Architect. Maria led the effort in proactively securing the City of New York’s IoT, ICS infrastructure and the City’s water systems. Maria stood up the first of its kind centralized proactive IoT and ICS cyber security programs for a municipality for the City of New York, serving over 67+ agencies, entities, and offices. She also led the team that performed the cybersecurity assessments on NYC fresh and reclaimed water facilities, America’s largest. 

Prior to NYC Cyber Command Maria co-founded SurveillanceGrid, a smart city systems integrator. Her smart city designs and projects won the Physical Security sectors top awards; Secured Cities – Gold Winning Project, Best Public Safety Project in the Public Sector, Hollister, CA – 2015. League of California Cities, Helen Putnam Award – Best Public Safety Project for the City of King, CA – 2019.

She was also with Cisco Systems for 13 years in various positions in InfoSec, Corporate Quality, Network Management, IT and Web 2.0 Architecture.  Maria worked 8+ years at NASA Ames Research Center and was responsible for the overall administration, information and network security of 325-plus Unix systems including the Cray Supercomputers at the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Center (NAS) at NASA Ames. In this role she was on the ‘first’ cybersecurity incident response team when the Morris Worm infected the NASA WLAN, the birth of cybersecurity. Prior to NASA Maria was a communications software engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation where she worked on the satellite communications system, MilStar.