Kelly Onu designs secure, AI-aware digital systems while expanding access to cybersecurity careers for African professionals.
Kelly Onu’s career in cybersecurity began with a small, practical problem. As a student in Nigeria, she figured out how to unlock a schoolmate’s laptop. This curiosity to look beneath the surface has followed her into an eight-year career securing some of the most sensitive digital systems used by global companies today.
Life in cyberspace
Kelly Onu is a Nigerian-American cybersecurity consultant with a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and a master’s degree in cybersecurity from Georgia Tech. She currently works as a Senior Cybersecurity Consultant at Ernst & Young (EY), where she designs secure-by-design programs and AI-driven threat detection strategies for Fortune 500 clients across sectors, including biotechnology and financial services.
Her work spans application security, cloud security, DevSecOps, and offensive security across web, mobile, API, and cloud environments, using frameworks such as NIST CSF and ISO 27001 to improve both security posture and regulatory compliance.
Before EY, the Nigerian-born cyber expert worked in consulting and product-focused security roles, including at Sage Software, where she helped secure more than ten financial-management products used by small and medium-sized businesses. There, she worked on embedding automated security checks into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring vulnerabilities were detected before insecure code reached production.
A defining theme in Onu’s work is her focus on building security early rather than reacting late. As artificial intelligence became central to modern systems, her work expanded into AI and emerging-technology security. She contributes to Cloud Security Alliance’s AI Organisational Responsibilities Guide and the Agentic AI Red Teaming Guide, helping organisations define roles, assess risks, and design red-teaming approaches for generative and autonomous systems.
Her current focus includes defending against adversarial uses of AI such as automated phishing, deepfakes, and large-scale social-engineering campaigns, while promoting ethical AI guardrails, zero-trust architecture, and proactive threat modelling.
Alongside her technical career, the cyber expert has built Hacker Proof HQ, a global cybersecurity community that began as a podcast and now includes more than 5,000 members, primarily African tech professionals and members of the diaspora.
Through mentorship sessions, hackathons, job-preparation workshops, and an upcoming AI-powered job agent, the community addresses barriers such as experience gaps and a lack of role models, particularly for women, who represent a small fraction of Africa’s cybersecurity workforce.
Kelly Onu also serves on boards and committees of leading global technology and cybersecurity organisations, including groups that support women in engineering. Through these roles and her work with nonprofits such as WISP, she mentors young professionals, advocates for inclusive hiring, and helps widen access to scholarships. In 2025, she was recognised as one of the IEEE Computer Society’s Top 30 Early Career Professionals and received the EY Women in Tech Global Award for Unsung Hero (Gold).
