BEN VOCE-GARDNER
New York's Point Man for Cyber, Terror, and Critical Infrastructure
Critical Cognitive Infrastructure
Director, Office of Counter Terrorism, New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services
Oversees the Division's Cyber Incident Response Team, Critical Infrastructure Protection Unit, Public Safety Unit, and Domestic Terrorism Prevention Unit
Former Director of Cybersecurity Policy, New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services
Former Assistant Secretary to the Governor for Public Safety, overseeing Homeland Security, State Police, and Corrections
Speaker, Eradicate Hate Global Summit, on preventing hate-motivated and extremist violence
Thursday
10:45 AM
Understanding the Pathway to Violence
The cyber domain provides hostile actors with unprecedented opportunities to identify vulnerable individuals, exploit grievances, and influence or mobilize them toward harmful action. This presentation examines how adversaries use online platforms to recruit, manipulate, and coerce susceptible audiences—and the tools available to detect, disrupt, and counter those efforts.
Director, Office of Counterterrorism
New York State
Ben Voce-Gardner serves as Director of the Office of Counter Terrorism for the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, where he oversees four distinct units spanning cyber incident response, critical infrastructure protection, public safety, and domestic terrorism prevention, giving him a rare, unified view of how digital and physical threats increasingly intersect.
Before leading the Office of Counter Terrorism, Voce-Gardner served as the Division's Director of Cybersecurity Policy, managing the state's cybersecurity assets and developing policy to address emerging threats to state and local government systems. Earlier in his career, he served as Assistant Secretary to the Governor for Public Safety, a role that placed the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, the Division of Military and Naval Affairs, the State Police, the Cyber Security Advisory Board, the Division of Criminal Justice Services, and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision all within his portfolio.
That progression, from statewide public safety policy to cybersecurity policy to counterterrorism operations, has positioned Voce-Gardner at the intersection of fields that rarely share the same table: cyber defense, critical infrastructure resilience, and domestic terrorism prevention. He has spoken publicly on that intersection at forums including the Eradicate Hate Global Summit, where discussions center on preventing hate-motivated and extremist violence, a threat increasingly shaped by online radicalization and disinformation as much as by physical danger.