Thomas Brown

Managing Director

New York

Tom Brown is a managing director and global leader of BRG’s Cyber Security & Investigations practice.

He specializes in helping clients manage cyber risk, respond to and investigate cyber incidents, remediate vulnerabilities, and address—from a technical perspective—post-incident regulatory inquiries and litigation.

Before joining BRG, Mr. Brown served for twelve years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he supervised the Complex Frauds and Cyber Crime Unit. During his tenure, he led an extraordinarily broad range of complex, cross-border cyber investigations, including some of the most technologically challenging cases ever pursued by the US government. They included Silk Road, a $1.2 billion underground drug website; the prolific “hacktivist” groups Anonymous and LulzSec; the hack of NASDAQ; Liberty Reserve, an online digital currency used to launder more than $6 billion in criminal proceeds; the hack of Citibank; Rove Digital, a massive botnet that infected more than four million computers; and Samarth Agrawal, who was convicted after trial of stealing high-frequency trading code from Société Générale. Mr. Brown has particular experience with the virtual currencies WebMoney and Bitcoin, as well as cyber national-security matters.

Mr. Brown also led significant investigations and prosecutions of a wide variety of white collar offenses, including economic espionage and theft of trade secrets, money laundering, FCPA violations, securities fraud, bankruptcy fraud, identity theft, criminal copyright theft, and tax fraud, among others. In addition, he created an innovative strategy to combat Internet piracy, which formed the basis for “Operation In Our Sites,” a international intellectual property rights enforcement program by the US Department of Homeland Security.

As well as conducting ten jury trials and arguing a number of appeals before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Mr. Brown also won favorable judicial opinions with national impact on cyber-related issues, including an electronic surveillance matter and a case of first impression concerning the compelled production of data stored overseas by Internet service providers.

Mr. Brown was a recipient of the FBI Director’s Award for Outstanding Cyber Investigation and was named “Prosecutor of the Year” by the Federal Law Enforcement Foundation in 2011.

Mr. Brown frequently lectures on cyber security issues to legal, business and law enforcement groups. He is a member of the New York Bar.