Cytactic, a leader in Cyber Incident Response Management (CIRM), appointed cybersecurity leader Tim Brown as Chief Strategy Officer today. Brown will lead global strategy, product direction, and strategic alliances as enterprises face a growing gap between the velocity of technical cyber response and the organization's ability to manage a crisis. Cybersecurity veteran brings firsthand SUNBURST crisis experience as Cytactic expands AI-powered Cyber Incident Response Management.
As SolarWinds' CISO, Brown led the response to the 2020 SUNBURST supply-chain compromise across technical containment, executive decision-making, customer communication, regulatory scrutiny, and public accountability.
In 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Brown personally over SolarWinds' cybersecurity disclosures, the first SEC action of its kind against a sitting CISO. The SEC dismissed the case with prejudice in 2025. The case put unprecedented focus on CISOs' personal accountability during crises.
Brown joins Cytactic as the gap he lived through becomes structural: Security teams have spent years automating detection and containment; the organization around them hasn't. When incidents become business crises, security, legal, communications, executives, and the board must make consequential decisions with incomplete information, under a clock they don't control.
Cytactic research bears this out. In a survey of 480 U.S. cybersecurity executives, 70% said internal misalignment caused more chaos during an incident than the threat actor, and 54% said shifting decision ownership created delays.
"A major cyber attack isn't just a SecOps incident; it is a business crisis," said Tim Brown. "Technical containment is only half the battle. The harder challenge is coordinating the organization when decisions must be made quickly, on incomplete information, with legal, regulatory, customer, and business consequences. I joined Cytactic because CIRM provides the operational structure organizations need to prepare for that moment and execute when it matters most."
Cytactic's Agentic CIRM platform enables enterprises to:
Prepare and rehearse: Build and validate response plans through realistic, threat-aligned simulations.
Coordinate the incident: Orchestrate Security, IT, Legal, Communications, and executives with defined roles and workflows.
Execute under pressure: Maintain real-time situational awareness, automate workflows, and communicate securely out-of-band when normal systems are compromised.
Maintain accountability: Capture decisions, actions, communications, and regulatory obligations in a structured system of record.
About Cytactic
Cytactic is pioneering CIRM. Its Agentic platform helps organizations prepare for, simulate, and manage complex cyber incidents with a dedicated system of record, coordinating people, decisions, and actions at the speed of modern threats.
