Oritse J. Uku

Security Is Judged
by What Holds Under Pressure.

Oritse J. Uku is a cybersecurity executive. He has served as incident commander on major cybersecurity incidents at Citigroup and as board-appointed CISO of two Northwestern Mutual subsidiaries.

  • He holds a BA and an MBA from Boston College, a Master of International Affairs from Columbia, and a CISO executive certificate from Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College.
  • He holds the CISSP and three GIAC certifications: GCIH, GCTI, and GDAT.
  • He is the author of Taking the Boy Scouts to War, a memoir of his Afghanistan tour.
Oritse J. Uku

The record

Command, escalation, and intelligence.

He has held both ends of the escalation line, as the executive incident commanders called at Northwestern Mutual and, before that, as the incident commander at Citigroup.

I.
Northwestern Mutual

The executive incident commanders escalated to

He ran security for two regulated subsidiaries from 2022, and in 2025 their boards appointed him CISO of both. Incident commanders escalated to him when a decision exceeded their authority, and he briefed the subsidiary and parent-company boards on cyber risk.

II.
Citigroup

Incident commander on major cybersecurity incidents

He led the cyber threat management team for North America, wrote the bank’s major incident-response runbook and third-party incident-response playbook, and led the eighteen-month effort that trained its first cadre of cloud incident responders.

III.
U.S. Army

Senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan

As senior intelligence officer for the Army command advising Afghan army and police units across the western region, he directed Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence specialists and briefed the commander.

The full record →

The argument

The profession’s entry tier

The Pipeline Paradox

Agentic AI is automating the entry-level tasks of cybersecurity. Those tasks were the profession’s only apprenticeship. Oritse J. Uku holds a seat on the 7AI CISO Advisory Program, where agentic security is being defined as a category.

The reference page →

Both arguments he has published, with their sources and stated limits, are collected on the Arguments page.

Writing

Becoming Cyber

For the person at the door, and the people who decide whether it opens. It runs in seasons rather than as a feed. Season One is publishing now, biweekly on Thursdays.

Becoming Cyber →

CyberFuture

CyberFuture is written for security leaders and the boards they report to, from the operating side. Issues appear when a development warrants interpretation.

CyberFuture →
Essays and external publications →

Speaking and press

Press and speaking inquiries: media@oritseuku.com

Media and speaking →Disclosures →