Manager, Cybersecurity & Network Infrastructure at the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria · Founder/CEO, ARX AMANI Technologies · writing as TheSecuredAnalyst
I build security systems where none exist — and I build them to last.
Every intrusion has an entry point, and so does every career. Mine was a systems analyst seat in 2011, and it taught me early that most security failures start as operations failures.
Seven years across oil & gas, resources and media: running systems, building networks, putting the first security controls in place, and managing ICT projects end to end.
That's where the habits formed: document everything, automate the repeat work, and never pay a vendor for what a well-run team can do itself.
Attackers measure persistence by how long they go unnoticed. I measure it by how long the systems keep working. Scroll to watch a national bank network come online.
September 2018. A CBN-regulated bank, a headquarters in Abuja, and a security function that mostly had to be built rather than inherited.
Physicist by training. Systems builder by habit. The first job was to find out what was actually on the network.
Forty-plus offices across the country, 1,000+ users, and a firewall estate that had to behave like one network instead of forty.
Endpoint protection and patching, managed from one console. Unknown machines become known; unpatched ones become patched.
Amber → teal is the whole job, repeated forever.
Branches stream events back to a central SIEM. The goal isn't to collect logs. It's to be able to answer "what happened?" before someone asks.
Every network gets tested eventually. What matters is how fast you see it, how cleanly you cut it off, and whether it spreads.
Detect. Isolate. Restore. Write it down. (You can try it yourself further down.)
Not a hero moment, but a system that keeps working after the person who built it goes home.
No exploits, no stolen tokens. Just promotions earned in the open and credentials earned one exam at a time.
BSc Physics, Ado-Ekiti (2010) · MSc Physics, University of Lagos (2015) · PhD research in physics (computational materials), University of Lagos, in progress · MSc International Affairs & Diplomacy, ABU, at project stage. Physics teaches you to distrust a model until it survives contact with reality, and security is the same discipline.
An attacker moves laterally to find more access. I moved laterally to find harder problems: a UK managed security provider, a European cloud network and a national government programme. All three ran concurrently with the day job at the bank, which never stopped.
Cyber Security Manager / Senior Cyber Security Analyst
Network Security Engineer
Team Lead, ICT Security & Infrastructure QA · Trade Modernisation Project
An institution doesn't always need a vendor. Sometimes it needs someone who understands the problem well enough to build exactly what fits and then run it. These are the systems built and run from inside the bank.
Years of legacy contribution schedules that never matched the records they were meant to update. The backlog was too large to work by hand.
A reconciliation platform that streams 300k-row schedules, matches them against a 9M-record history on BVN, auto-matches the confident cases and queues the rest for human review.
A backlog that once needed teams of people is now a queue with an audit trail and role-based approvals.
Configuration changes typed by hand across a fleet of switches. One wrong line can take a floor offline.
Plain-English requests turned into switch commands by a local model. Protected VLANs are hard-blocked, incidents are detected, and every fix needs human approval.
Faster routine operations, with the dangerous changes structurally impossible rather than merely discouraged.
Allowances calculated manually, approvals chased on paper, and the rules applied differently by different people.
A calculator that encodes the policy once, plus an approval workflow that routes every claim the same way.
One rulebook, applied consistently, with every approval on record.
Recurring duties and deadlines that slip because a reminder is easy to ignore.
Reminders that keep going until there's evidence the task is done. A reminder alone isn't enough.
Accountability moves from memory to the system.
Branch connectivity drops, and nobody who needs to know finds out in time.
A tool that emails the right offices when a link goes down, so the people affected hear it first.
Outages are communicated, not discovered.
Directory, network access control, VPN and patching all live in separate consoles, with separate blind spots.
A unified platform under construction: consistent naming, AI-assisted access decisions, and integration with endpoint and SIEM tooling.
The goal is identity as the control plane, with one place to answer "who has access, and should they?"
In a regulated bank, an AI that acts on its own is a liability, and one that only chats is a toy. The useful middle is a pipeline: the model does the translation work, policy decides what's allowed, and a person signs off on anything that changes state. Pick a request to watch it go through.
Illustrative walkthrough of the design pattern. The model runs locally, so no network data leaves the building.
Most prompts are wishes. A production prompt is closer to a contract: it says who the model is, what it may see, what it must never do, what shape the answer takes, and what to do when it isn't sure. Hover a line to see the principle behind it.
The keys to your kingdom, kept on your own servers, used by people who never see them.
Walk into most Nigerian institutions and ask where the domain admin password lives. The honest answer is a spreadsheet, a notebook, or a WhatsApp chat. Six engineers share it, it hasn't changed in years, and it leaves with whoever resigns. When something goes wrong, nobody can say who logged in or what they typed. The tools that fix this are priced in dollars, hosted abroad, and built for teams that already have specialists. ArxVault is privileged access management built for everyone else.
Outside the bank, ARX AMANI builds security tools for African realities: low bandwidth, shared devices and SMEs with no security team. Statuses are honest: paused means paused.
A learning-path finder for African beginners breaking into cybersecurity. You answer a few questions and get a route, not a reading list.
cyberstart.arxamani.com ↗An open-source Python security toolkit with guardrails built in, so the tools can't be pointed at things they shouldn't be.
Budgeted security context for AI assistants over MCP, CLI and local models. It gives the model what it needs to reason about your environment and nothing more.
AI-assisted vulnerability scanning that explains findings in business language, so a client knows what to fix first.
Spaced repetition, timed mock exams weighted like the real exam, and a local AI tutor that explains rather than just grading. Built for SecAI+, and works for any certification.
A SOC that teaches as it works: every alert explains itself. Paused on purpose until the architecture is right.
Breach intelligence for the Nigerian landscape. It's the prerequisite for a WhatsApp threat-briefing bot.
Security posture scoring for SMEs, giving a business owner one number they can understand and improve.
Everything learned gets taken out of my head and published on Medium, LinkedIn and arxamani.com, including cyber insurance, 2026 threat trends and AI in the SOC.
The Sterling Bank, Remita and CAC breaches, mapped to the OWASP Top 10:2025: what failed, why, and what it means for your business.
Read on arxamani.com ↗A laptop, Llama 3 and a custom MCP server became a personal threat-hunting assistant for an EDR platform, without sending security data abroad.
Read on Medium ↗How ancient temptation maps onto modern attacks: phishing in Eden, broken access control, Trojan fruit. Part of the Sacred Architecture writing.
Read on Medium ↗Tools I've worked with in the field across banking, government and managed security. Dashed tags are where new things get built first.
Two tabletop exercises based on the decisions security teams make every week. Nothing here touches a real network or sends any data.
No hiding anything here. A security professional tracks open issues on their own systems, so this profile tracks its operator's, each with an owner and a fix.
Hiring for a security leadership role? ArxVault demos and pilots, security architecture, AI automation that holds up to audit, managed security for SMEs, or speaking on faith and technology. The door is open.
I walk into vacuums and install structure. I finish what I start, and I delegate so people grow, not just so work moves.
Faith is not decoration on the work. It's the architecture underneath it, and the two were never meant to be separate systems.
Truth over comfort. I would rather be corrected today than be impressive and wrong.