Zach Furness

As of October 2024, Zach Furness is the Chief Information Security Officer of MITRE, having joined the organization in that role.

Career path

Before this appointment, Furness served as Deputy CISO and Director of Cyber Risk Management at a hospital system.

Earlier in his career he spent more than 29 years at MITRE, where he worked as a technical director within the National Cybersecurity FFRDC.

During that tenure, Furness contributed to engineering research for MITRE, including work on simulation-based methods for developing complex systems.

That research, described in the paper Enabling Engineering of Complex Systems Through Simulation-Based Experimentation, discussed lessons learned in building the Collaborative Experimentation Environment, a simulation-based environment used to support systems engineering work.

He left MITRE in 2018 to become Director of IT Security at Inova Health.

His move to MITRE as CISO in October 2024 marked a return to the organization where he had spent nearly three decades earlier in his career.

Published work

While serving as a technical director within MITRE's National Cybersecurity FFRDC, Furness authored S/MIME Certificate Management through DNS – DANE: A New Approach, published in the ISSA Journal.

That same issue of the ISSA Journal carried contributions from other National Cybersecurity FFRDC colleagues, including a piece on securing protected health information by the FFRDC's Healthcare Sector Team technical lead.

The issue also included an article on the evolution of the Cybersecurity Framework and a separate piece on a multi-pronged approach to GDPR compliance, reflecting the range of security topics covered alongside Furness's own contribution.

Furness's FFRDC role and his published work on certificate management and simulation-based systems engineering span the years before his move into hospital-sector cybersecurity leadership and his subsequent return to MITRE as CISO.