In the modern age of containerized infrastructure and AI-powered development environments, legacy systems often continue to exist—having significant utility that prevents their eradication but being too complicated to be sufficiently protected by new technologies.
For Abiola Akinosi, a veteran of more than a decade in the practice of cybersecurity engineering, this hidden intersection of outdated code and contemporary attack surfaces is not seen just as an overlooked relic of the past, but as an urgent frontier in the ongoing battle for resilience in its digital forms.
Abiola has built up a reputation for herself by focusing on those systems which others in her field often overlooked. Whereas security engineers have focused attention upon zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits other cloud-native apps, she has been able to carve out her own niche by doing extensive researching into the largely unaddressed area of dormant or “dead” code—code which stops running but remains in existing systems, harboring potential to act as a chance for long-term attacks.
Abiola’s forensic-based approach to security is based upon the belief that dormant code, while inactive in system function, can carry residual elements of out-of-date logic, backdoors, or insecure library calls. Such residual elements have largely been left out of traditional scans or threat assessment platforms, leaving space for attackers to take advantage of weaknesses in critical infrastructure.
Abiola’s earlier experiences at work taught her some striking lessons about risks related to continuous repair of an aging system rather than the choice to replace one. She has distinct memories of her time at a healthcare firm whose patient data platform experienced too much update over a fifteen-year period. Underneath all the layers of newly built interfaces were ingrained practices dating back to when the platform was first developed—some written in COBOL, others using out-of-date C libraries, and other elements written in unsupported in-house scripting languages.
These lines of legacy code were not really visible to today’s DevOps staff who were in charge of running the platform, yet Abiola saw them for what they really were: glaring risks.
Her hybrid methodology combines extensive reverse-engineering, static code analysis, and threat modeling, not just covering the existing feature set of systems but also historical use cases. She uses time-based forensic models to examine code deactivation timing to determine whether code deactivation is tied to prior security compromises, data loss, staffing changes, or other impactful events. Under this approach, Abiola not only discovers threats but also reconstructs timelines of system development, contextualizing technical choices and vice versa, and unearths vulnerabilities that can live for decades.
One of her outstanding achievements was in designing a national banking system, where dormant modules of an out-of-date foreign exchange system were still an integral part of the deployment pipeline. They had not been altered in decades; still, Abiola’s forensic inspection revealed they still processed input from legacy APIs, some of which were accessible within partner platforms.
In her report, she laid out an attack chain created by malformed input from an decommissioned API, resulting in unauthorized access to financial data—without requiring any “live” code execution. Executives at the bank were taken aback. Directly because of her efforts, an interdepartmental protocol was created for analyzing legacy code artifacts and refactoring compilation pipelines to ensure separation of non-executable dependencies.
Abiola’s work has provoked considerable questions about software lifecycle governance and about organizational ethical obligations to maintain systems beyond design intent.
Through all her various presentations, she encourages executives and engineers to consider risks in code that is “forgotten but not gone.” She theorizes that in today’s age of supply chain attacks and nation-state espionage, remnants of legacy logic in secured environments can represent the best attack vector available—known, unpatched, and finally, unguarded.
But her reach goes beyond enterprise security. Abiola is an ardent supporter of increasing the forensic literacy of security teams, in environments marked by tight budgets and crumbling infrastructure. She has mentored innumerable engineers in Sub-Saharan Africa, easing them into careers by educating them in forensic analysis and reminding them that not only does cybersecurity include stopping immediate threats, but also understanding continuing risks.
In an age of rapid development, Abiola Akinosi is an affecting reminder of why context matters in securing our computing environments. As environments evolve and code changes, we must remember that nothing really disappears—unless through careful and deliberate effort.
Her approach is unambiguous: unless ancient code is completely eliminated, it represents an ever-persistent threat. Additionally, through her creative advances in security forensics, she continually exposes hidden weaknesses that are inherent to those frameworks of days gone by.
