Rotimi Akinyele

Rotimi is currently a Director in the Group Information Security Department at Dubai Holding, a global investment holding company managing a diverse portfolio of assets across 10 sectors (Hospitality, Real Estate, Entertainment & theme parks, ICT, Media, Design, Manufacturing & Logistics, Education, Science & Retail).

Prior to that, he was the Head of Information Security & Business Continuity at a Government authority in Ras Al Khaimah, UAE where he was responsible for managing Information Security, IT Governance, Risk, Compliance and Business Continuity across multiple sectors (Energy & Utilities, Healthcare, Ports Management, Tourism & Hospitality, Education, Mining & Quarrying, Transportation & Logistics).

Rotimi is a techno-functional cybersecurity leader with over a decade of experience performing & leading teams of Information security, risk and privacy professionals to deliver a variety of security programs and services in complex, multi-stakeholder environments across Middle East and Africa.

His experience ranges from security engineering and architecture, redteaming/adversary simulation/penetration testing, blue teaming/incident response/breach and compromise assessments, application & cloud security, setting up intelligence-driven 24x7 SOCs, access and identity management, threat and vulnerability management, policy, guidelines and standards development, data privacy compliance programs, Business Continuity and Disaster recovery, Security training & awareness and successfully managing enterprise risk management programs.

Rotimi is the First Offensive Security Certified Professional/Expert (OSCP/OSCE) out of his country. He is a 2-times (2015/2018) Global Cyberlympics African Champion (a Global cybersecurity competition for ethical hackers). He’s won multiple Ethical Hacking CTF contests regionally & globally.

He has successfully delivered the Assessment, Design and Implementation of the following standards and frameworks: ISO 27001, ISO 22301, NESA, ADSIC v2, ISR, ISO 20000, COBIT 5, NIST, SANS CIS and PCI DSS - in various regions within the following sectors - Financial services, Govt. entities, FMCGs, Insurance firms, Oil & Gas Organizations, Telecommunication providers & Privately held orgs.

Rotimi spends his free time participating in Capture The Flag ethical hacking contests – where he leads a multinational hacking team to solve challenges ranging from Reverse Engineering, Network/System/Web Exploitations, Forensics, Shellcoding, Crypto and Steg.

He also founded NaijaSecCon (Africa's foremost Cybersecurity conference).