Jason Kikta

Chief Technology Officer at Automox

CTO/CISO securing AI at the frontier | 7 years countering state/criminal actors at US Cyber Command | Adjunct Lecturer, Johns Hopkins SAIS | Senior Technical Advisor, IST

About Jason Kikta

Jason Kikta is Chief Technology Officer at Automox. Location: CTO/CISO securing AI at the frontier | 7 years countering state/criminal actors at US Cyber Command | Adjunct Lecturer, Johns Hopkins SAIS | Senior Technical Advisor, IST.

Jason Kikta is the Chief Technology Officer at Automox. Before becoming CTO, he served as the company's CISO and SVP of Product, transforming its security function from a compliance obligation into a competitive differentiator and refocusing the product team on the endpoint management problems that matter most to IT practitioners. Jason has worked in IT for over 30 years, beginning with independent consulting before joining the US Marine Corps in 1999. Over more than 23 years of military service, he built and operated communications networks under demanding conditions across four continents, supporting thousands of personnel through combat deployments and managing tens of millions of dollars in telecommunications infrastructure. His seven years at US Cyber Command's Cyber National Mission Force brought that operational foundation into cyberspace, where he founded the command's private sector partnership program, served as Enable Defense Lead for the Election Security Group, the joint Cyber Command and NSA effort to defend the 2018 and 2020 elections from foreign interference, helped build the Hunt Forward program, and created the command's public disclosure program for exposing threat actor tools and techniques. He also served as a strategic threat consultant to Twitter, advising senior leadership on countering political, physical, and cyber threats to the platform and its global operations. Jason is an adjunct lecturer at the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where he teaches how intelligence agencies conduct espionage and covert actions in cyberspace. He is also an adjunct senior technical advisor to the Institute for Security and Technology, focused on AI, cybersecurity, and ransomware issues, and sits on the executive committee of IST's Security Level 5 (SL5) Task Force, which is developing a technical standard for securing frontier AI systems against the most capable state-backed threats. He served as an expert reviewer of NSA's zero trust standard and hosts Automox's Secure IT podcast and Patch [FIX] Tuesday.

Skills

  • Strategic Business Advice
  • Executive Advisory
  • Strategic Consulting

Additional experience

  • Chief Information Security Officer / Senior Vice President, Product

    Automox

    October 2023 – October 2025

Education

  • Bachelor of Science - BS, Miami University
  • Command & Staff College Distance Education Program, Marine Corps University