PENN Entertainment Appoints Gary Hunter as Chief Information Security Officer
PENN Entertainment has appointed Gary Hunter as its Chief Information Security Officer, placing him in charge of enterprise cybersecurity across the company’s Interactive and Retail gaming businesses. For an operator pushing hard into online betting and casino, the choice of who guards the platforms and the player data is not a side note. It is part of the growth story.
Why Cybersecurity Leadership Matters Now for Gaming Operators
Online gaming runs on trust. Players hand over identity documents, payment details and betting histories, and they expect all of it to stay safe. As PENN expands its digital footprint through its Interactive arm, the volume and sensitivity of that data grows with it. Bringing in a dedicated, senior security leader is the kind of move operators make when they want security treated as foundational rather than reactive. PENN said the appointment comes “at an exciting time of growth across our Interactive and Retail businesses,” which puts the hire squarely in a growth context rather than a purely defensive one.
What Gary Hunter Brings to PENN Entertainment
Hunter joins PENN from REI, where he served as Chief Information Security Officer. Before that, according to his professional profile, he spent close to 11 years at The Walt Disney Company in senior information-security roles, most recently as Executive Director and Information Security Officer at Walt Disney Studios, and earlier in a deputy security role within Disney Entertainment. His career also includes a period leading security engineering, operations and response at Expedia, and a long earlier run as an enterprise architect at Travelport.
The common thread is consumer-facing businesses that live or die on protecting content, identity and payment data at scale. That is a useful background for a gaming operator whose digital platforms carry exactly those pressures.
The Operator Read: What This Signals for PENN Interactive
Here is the part operators will notice. PENN did not hire a security leader out of a quiet, low-stakes environment. It hired one from businesses where a data breach or a content leak is a front-page event. For a company whose Interactive division is central to its future, that profile reads as deliberate. The signal is that PENN wants security capability matched to the risk its online and retail operations now carry, and that it sees that capability as something to build around rather than bolt on. This is editorial interpretation rather than a stated PENN position, but it is a reasonable reading of who the company chose and why.
What Comes Next for PENN Entertainment and the Regulated Gaming Market?
The immediate work is execution: standing up and running PENN’s enterprise security program across its gaming, betting and digital operations as those businesses grow. More broadly, the hire fits a pattern worth watching across regulated gaming, where operators are increasingly treating cybersecurity and data protection as competitive and trust-building functions rather than compliance overhead. If that pattern holds, the real measure of this appointment will not be the announcement itself but how security shapes the way PENN scales. The takeaway is simple: in modern iGaming, who protects the platform is becoming as strategic as who builds it.
Source: PENN Entertainment
