Lou Von Thaer

Lou Von Thaer, Leidos Nat’l Security Sector President, Chosen to Wash100 for Cyber and ISR Leadership

Executive Mosaic is honored to unveil Lou Von Thaer, president of the national security sector at Leidos, as the newest inductee into the Wash100 — a group of influential leaders in the government contracting arena.

Von Thaer leads a team provides cybersecurity, logistics, training, biometrics, electronic security, command-and-control and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems to intelligence and defense organizations in both commercial and government sectors.

Von Thaer led General Dynamics advanced information systems business as president for eight years before he joined Leidos in June 2013, when it was still known as Science Applications International Corp.

In a January 2014 conversation with ExecutiveBiz, Von Thaer discussed his then-new company’s transition to become Leidos and how government and commercial organizations have sought to get a better grasp of cybersecurity.

“More executives are paying attention and more customers are increasingly knowledgeable about cyber threats,” Von Thaer told ExecutiveBiz.

“People are starting to wonder why after all this time and all this hard work, we still find most of our cyber attacks through defensive means after attacks have entered our networks, by recognizing signatures that we’ve seen before.”

Von Thaer is also a veteran of Lucent Technologies and its predecessor AT&T Bell Laboratories, the place where he started his GovCon career.

“You could go up and ask anything to people that were just incredible engineers with long careers, and they would sit down, spend half a day with you, and help teach you. So it was a good learning environment. I learned a lot of those things that I think most design engineers learn,” Von Thaer said of the famed Bell Labs.

Executive Mosaic extends its congratulations to Lou Von Thaer and the Leidos team for their receipt of this award.