Career profile
Rich Agostino
Senior Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer & Infrastructure, Target
- Current role, per sources checked 27 September 2026
- Not stated in the sources
Rich Agostino is senior vice president, chief information security officer and head of infrastructure at Target, leading the retailer's global cybersecurity team.
Career path
Agostino joined Target in 2014, moving from a post as GE's vice president of technology and risk compliance to take on the job of overhauling the retailer's approach to cybersecurity.
The hire came after Target's 2013 payment-system breach, an incident that predated his arrival.
He was part of the launch of Target's Cyber Fusion Center, where security teams work to identify and contain threats, and in 2017 was promoted to senior vice president and chief information security officer.
Building Target's security program
Target's cybersecurity strategy under Agostino combines in-house threat-driven capability with continuous 24x7 monitoring: RSA Conference's bio describes a proactive, threat-driven strategy that leverages advanced in-house experts, round-the-clock Cyber Fusion Center operations, and custom-developed detection tools.
Agostino told CSO Online that the significance of the 2013 breach was less about scale than precedent: it was, he said, the first time consumer-facing businesses had faced a level of sophistication previously seen only in nation-state attacks on defense contractors.
Beyond Target, Agostino chairs the board of directors of the Retail & Hospitality ISAC and sits on the PCI Security Standards Council's Board of Advisors.
To staff that program, Agostino told CSO Online he hired hundreds of security experts drawn from finance, government and other industries in addition to retail, so the team would have the numbers, knowledge and programming skills to build and run its own defenses.
That team now works around the clock at the Cyber Fusion Center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, where a Cyber Threat Intelligence group tracks cybercrime trends and a Cyber Security Incident Response group builds Target-specific detection tools and watches the company's networks and systems.
Agostino also described Target as a founding member and top contributor to the Retail & Hospitality ISAC, the information-sharing group he now chairs, framing the effort as treating cybersecurity as work no single retailer can do alone.