About Matt McManus

Welcome to the McManShow, a blog about cybersecurity, technology, management, and some other things thrown in, all based on my personal experiences and observations throughout my career.

I am a Senior Director in FTI Consulting’s Cybersecurity & Privacy Practice. You can find me here and on LinkedIn.

I have built a career of nearly 15 years in cybersecurity, privacy, consulting, project and program management. I have worked in a client/customer-facing capacity for most of my career, and have also worked in industry. 

As a cybersecurity consultant, I have broad experience across a range of service areas and industries. 

I have managed teams performing complex investigations, including into trade secret theft and insider risk, as well as online disinformation and smear campaigns targeted against high-profile individuals. 

I have led incident response and forensic investigation efforts, often serving in an incident command capacity, helping to aggregate and disseminate relevant information, determine priorities, and work eradication, remediation, and root-cause analysis. 

I lead assessment workstreams, in the role of independent assessor approved by regulatory bodies or at the behest of clients looking to demonstrate their adherence with cybersecurity frameworks, best practices, and regulatory requirements. 

I have supported multiple expert witness testimony engagements, facilitating technical investigation and analysis and aiding in the determination of expert opinions and aid in the preparation for expert witness testimony. This has included cases of trade secret protection and implementation of reasonable measures to protect the security and privacy of sensitive information.

I have worked with clients that operate on a multi-national scale as well as individual high-profile clients who are themselves directly targeted by cyber threat actors.

In my career, and enhanced through my program management background, I have developed an expertise working across technical and non-technical stakeholders alike, including working with clinical providers to determine technical software requirements, understanding engineering priorities, distilling technical forensic observations into meaningful exhibits to include in litigation, provide to law enforcement, or to insurance providers.

Prior to my time at FTI Consulting, I served as a Senior Program Manager on the information security team and privacy working group at WeWork, where I got to experience first-hand the complexities of implementing such programs on a global scale.

Prior to that, as a project manager for Planned Parenthood’s national information security program, I led efforts to implement key controls through a managed service model, across independently operating healthcare entities. 

My consulting experience began as an implementation and security lead for Epic, where I helped deliver large-scale projects and security best practices to over a dozen nationally recognized healthcare organizations and incorporated EMR security into hospital information security programs. I also owe a lot of my project management development to those first few years working on large-scale software implementation projects.

In EVERYTHING detailed above, I have fortunate to experience working on, managing, and leading many high-functioning teams (and some less so) with too many incredible team members and clients to count. A lot of my experience comes from managing through the dynamics and the relationships, especially in difficult moments and crisis situations, across these various teams. 

I owe so much of my own development to some exceptional mentors that I have had along the way. Part of my goal with this blog is to pass forward a little bit of that mentorship.

I graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. in Economics.

Along the way, I have obtained a number of relevant certifications, including the Security+, CISA, CIPP, Certified Enterprise Defender from SANS/GIAC, and PMP.

I enjoy good thought leadership, and hope you find some of these thoughts meaningful and/or actionable.

I am New York-based, and would love to hear from you.

The opinions expressed throughout are solely my own and do not represent the positions, strategies, or policies of my current or past employers.

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