Wisconsin’s state government cybersecurity landscape spans agencies that touch nearly every aspect of public life, from tax administration and transportation infrastructure to child welfare, public health, and the education system serving the state’s students and libraries. The government CISOs in this feature are protecting sensitive government data, citizen records, and the operational systems that state agencies depend on every day. Their backgrounds range from federal public health IT and national security intelligence to Marine Corps service and telecommunications, and all of them have landed in state government security, where accountability to the public is the defining characteristic of the work.
Bill Brinkley — Chief Information Security Officer, State of Wisconsin
Bill Brinkley became Wisconsin’s state CISO in June 2025, bringing a sixteen-year federal career at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health within the CDC. He served as information system security officer, compliance lead, and ultimately director of IT operations at NIOSH, overseeing a $32 million operations budget and $50 million in annual IT investments supporting critical national health programs including the National Firefighter Registry and the World Trade Center Health Program. During his tenure he reduced IT contract staff dependency by 50 percent, achieving $12 million in cost avoidance, implemented AI-powered solutions that cut process times by more than 80 percent, and introduced a risk-based compliance approach that reduced compliance overhead by half. His background also includes computer system security analyst roles at Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, and SOC shift management at Secureworks. That federal public health IT and defense contractor security foundation, applied now to statewide security governance in Wisconsin, gives him a scale and complexity of experience that shapes how he approaches the state CISO mandate.
Thomas Knox — Chief Information Security Officer, Wisconsin Department of Children and Families
Thomas Knox has served as CISO at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families since August 2014, building and sustaining the agency’s information security program across nearly twelve years. His background before DCF spans IT security administration and IT process analysis at Telephone and Data Systems over nearly eleven years, and security analyst work at Madison Gas and Electric. His career reflects a grounded, practitioner-built path into government security leadership: help desk and systems administration work gave way to security administration, then process analysis and SOX compliance coordination, then regulatory security work at a utility, and ultimately agency-level CISO accountability. At DCF, where the data being protected includes child welfare records and family services information for some of Wisconsin’s most vulnerable residents, that steady institutional commitment carries real weight.
Omid Karbassi — Chief Information Security Officer, Wisconsin Department of Transportation
Omid Karbassi has served as CISO at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation since May 2010, one of the longer continuous government CISO tenures in the state. His security focus spans GRC framework implementation, vulnerability management, risk assessment, compliance reporting, and employee forensics investigations, and he manages a team of security professionals providing daily operational support across the agency. He holds certifications in penetration testing, ethical hacking, incident handling, and network forensics, and holds a digital forensics degree, reflecting a technical depth that is uncommon at the executive security level in government. He is also an active member of Wisconsin’s Cyber Incident Response and Cyber Range team. Fifteen years of continuous security leadership at a state transportation agency, where the systems being protected include infrastructure planning data, licensing systems, and operational technology, reflects a career defined by institutional commitment and sustained technical engagement.
Mike Foster — Chief Information Security Officer, Wisconsin Department of Revenue
Before his government security career, Mike Foster served more than twenty-one years in the United States Marine Corps as a network management officer and S-3, responsible for strategic and tactical planning of all communication resources for a 10,000-person organization including satellite, terrestrial, switched networks, and telephone systems across worldwide operations. He joined the Wisconsin Department of Revenue as CISO in November 2017, bringing private sector security experience from Trek Bicycles, Meriter Hospital, Great Wolf Resorts, and Spectrum Brands that spans network architecture, system administration, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, PCI compliance, and hospitality security. At Great Wolf Resorts he built an automated vulnerability assessment program covering more than 400 servers across fifteen national locations, a 50-plus node honeypot network, and a log correlation system spanning Windows, Cisco, and Linux environments. He serves on the advisory board of CyberEd.io and on the board of directors of the Marine Corps Mustang Association. That combination of military communications leadership and private sector security engineering gives him a practitioner’s depth that informs how he leads security at a state agency managing sensitive taxpayer data.
Jennifer Mueller — Chief Information Security Officer, Wisconsin Department of Health Services
Jennifer Mueller has spent more than fourteen years at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, progressing from deputy director through deputy CISO and stepping into the CISO role in September 2022. During the COVID-19 pandemic she served concurrently as operations lead for the COVID testing team from May 2020 through July 2021, a dual responsibility that reflects the kind of operational flexibility that public health emergencies demand from government technology leaders. Before DHS, she spent nearly eleven years at EDS, an HP company, as a telephone systems administrator, desktop support specialist, and operational supervisor managing a technical infrastructure team of ten supporting Wisconsin’s Medicaid, BadgerCare Plus, and SeniorCare programs. That telecommunications and infrastructure operations background inside the state’s healthcare administration environment gives her a grounded understanding of the systems and data she now leads from a security perspective, across one of Wisconsin’s largest and most data-sensitive state agencies.
Paul Neff — Principal IT Security Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Before becoming CISO of the Wisconsin agency responsible for advancing public education and libraries statewide, Paul Neff spent nearly two decades inside the federal financial regulatory system. He held technology supervision and lead examiner roles at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, led incident management for the Federal Reserve System’s supervision function at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and served as director of cyber policy, preparedness, and response at the US Department of the Treasury, where he directed the department’s Sector Risk Management Agency responsibilities under the Homeland Security Act and served as acting deputy assistant secretary for administration and compliance. Before his Federal Reserve career, he was head of IT infrastructure and chief security officer for the Americas region at a global business process outsourcing firm, and before that directed an information security research and education facility at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He also ran ChicagoFIRST’s all-hazards public-private collaboration programs supporting cross-sector business resilience for Chicago critical infrastructure. That trajectory from financial sector critical infrastructure supervision at the Federal Reserve through Treasury cyber policy to state education agency CISO is one of the more distinctive career arcs in Wisconsin government security, and it brings a national security governance perspective to an agency whose mandate is protecting the technology infrastructure that serves every public school and library in the state.
Wisconsin’s Government Security Leaders Carry Real Accountability
Public sector security in Wisconsin is not abstract work. The data these leaders protect belongs to taxpayers, children in state care, patients in public health programs, drivers on state roads, students in public schools, and library patrons across every county. Several of the leaders in this feature have spent a decade or more inside the same agency, building programs that reflect deep institutional knowledge rather than frameworks applied from the outside. Others arrived from federal agencies, military service, or the private sector with experiences that have made their programs stronger. All of them are accountable to the public in ways that private sector security leaders are not, and their programs reflect that responsibility.
Discover more CISOs securing various government units at all levels:
- CISOs to Watch in Illinois’ Government Administration
- CISOs to Watch in Georgia’s Government Administration
- Guardians of the Public Trust: Oregon’s Government Cybersecurity Leaders
- Securing Minnesota’s Public Institutions: Government CISOs to Watch
- Securing Colorado’s Government from the Inside: A Public Sector Cybersecurity Feature
- CISOs to Watch in California State GovernmentÂ
