Mark Zachos: Automotive Cybersecurity Engineer, Educator and Standards Author
More than 30 years ago, electrical engineer Mark Zachos set out to solve in-vehicle and controller area network (CAN) issues. Little did he know then that he would be writing the rules that secure today’s modern vehicles. Now he sits at the top of his field for both.
Mark Zachos’s career began where most good engineering careers do — with a real problem that needed a real solution. Vehicle networks were growing more complex, more connected and more exposed. The diagnostic ports and communication protocols that made modern vehicles serviceable were also making them vulnerable. As an engineer specializing in in-vehicle and CAN networks and on-board diagnostics (OBD), Mark stepped into that gap – and never stepped back out. From a respected career as a software engineer at United Technologies to founding The Dearborn Group in the basement of his Farmington Hills, Michigan, home to chairing SAE and ISO vehicle cybersecurity committees and the TMC Cybersecurity Issues Task Force, the thread running through Mark’s career has been the same: build things that work, establish the frameworks that keep them secure and make sure the next generation of engineers knows how to do both.
Collaboration
Mark’s approach in the classroom is the same as his approach in a standards committee: bring the real problem into the room and work it together. There are no hypotheticals in vehicle cybersecurity. The vulnerabilities are documented. The exploits are published. The stakes — in commercial fleets, consumer vehicles and military platforms — are concrete. That’s what students work with from Day One.
Collaboration is more than a teaching style for Mark, it’s a conviction. Students aren’t there just to receive information, they’re there to develop judgment. The best measure of that, in his experience, is not a grade. It’s running into a former student at an SAE conference and finding out they now lead the program he helped them understand. It happens more often than people might expect when you’ve been teaching for 30 years.
Outside of the classroom, Mark runs DG Technologies, the company that grew out of The Dearborn Group and develops vehicle communication and diagnostic hardware and software used by the U.S. military and across the automotive, trucking and bus industries. He speaks regularly at industry conferences, serves on the Oakland County Connected Vehicle Task Force and has delivered guest lectures internationally — including at the Beijing Institute of Technology.
His is not a career divided between academia and industry. It operates on both tracks simultaneously, and is precisely why students who study with Mark leave with more than a credential. They leave with a working understanding of how the industry actually functions, who sets its direction and how to participate in shaping it.