In this special report featuring Abiola Akinosi, we are looking at digital necrobiology. Abiola Akinosi is a distinguished Nigerian cybersecurity engineer and senior IT leader, renowned for her expertise in IT controls, cybersecurity governance, and digital transformation.
She has consistently demonstrated excellence in implementing IT standards and frameworks, including COBIT 5 and ISO 27001, and has led major cybersecurity initiatives across Nigeria and internationally.
In an era of growing digitization, in which blockchain-based technologies and AI-powered infrastructure form the bedrock of our virtual lives, an incredibly meaningful yet often unaddressed question has arisen: What happens to people’s lives online after they have passed away?
At the forefront of this quest for understanding is Abiola Akinosi, an experienced Senior Cybersecurity Engineer who has over five years of real-world experience in developing and applying security solutions in evolving technological landscapes.
Her research and activism center forth in novel yet unexplored areas of integration of cybersecurity and necrobiology, emergent science dealing with administration and processing of late individuals’ digital remains.
Abiola became interested in this area while studying the security governance of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and AI-powered platforms.
She saw an enormous gap in cybersecurity practice in terms of ethical, technical, and policy-based solutions related to inactive or “posthumous” data.
Traditional systems have an advantage in that account closures or data transfers to next-of-kin can be done under centralized supervision, while decentralized systems offer significant challenges. Smart contracts run without emotions; they simply perform their assigned tasks. Also, AI agents do not shut down; they run in perpetuity.
For Abiola, this round-the-clock activity signaled a greater risk of security vulnerabilities.
In all this, she has called for an integral methodology toward protecting posthumous information, one that encompasses cryptographic inheritance mechanisms, zero-knowledge proofs, and artificial intelligence-enabled digital executors.
Her work is revolutionary not merely in terms of its technical complexity, but philosophically as well.
She sees necrobiology in the digital realm as not so much an issue of regulation, so much as an ethical dilemma reimagined for machines.
As she has often put it, “If we build AI and blockchain to think for a living, we have to instruct them to forget, to mourn, to let go.”
Much of her current work revolves around auditing platforms to determine the integration of artificial intelligence for dormant user account detection, which potentially can be leveraged for use in acts of identity theft, misinformation dissemination, or decentralized fraud.
In one mission involving an infrastructure for multi-chain-focused metaverses, Abiola oversaw a security audit in which he found in excess of 4,000 AI avatars representing users who were deceased, yet still active participants in live decentralized exchanges, without knowledge of the passing of their creators.
Her discoveries led to the integration of mortality-aware smart contract logic, a revolutionary development in the execution of smart contracts allowing for account dormancy, reputational locking, and information segmentation upon verified mortality triggers.
Abiola is also involved in policy making. She works in collaboration with data ethics committees and think tanks to advance universal standards for “digital passing rites,” which consist of directions allowing families or designated custodians to archive, anonymize, or remove digital remains consistent with cultural practice, legal standards, and individuals’ wishes.
She has been an advocate for implementing verification at death using biometric measures and blockchain notarization for last wishes, arguing that data sovereignty should not be limited by the confines of life.
In an age marked by the abilities of generative artificial intelligence to mimic writing styles, imitate voices, and replicate feelings, the idea of an afterlife in cyberspace raises complex issues about consent, privacy, and misuse.
Abiola Akinosi warns that, without clearly demarcated boundaries, a danger exists of creating virtual ghosts that would destabilize platforms, interfere with algorithms, and skew collective intuition data.
“Picture training future AI using unexpired data of the deceased,” she says, “and you get an idea why necrobiology isn’t sci-fi, it’s for cybersecurity.”
Abiola remains an influencer and guide for future cybersecurity professionals, sharing the importance of integrating empathy into security systems.
Her technical papers and training have become valuable elements in the design of curricula used in training for AI ethics and blockchain governance.
Additionally, apart from his technical skill, her different approach, seeing cybersecurity not only as protection for information, but also as protector of digital dignity, sets him apart among professionals.
With Web3’s emergence and incessant integration of artificial intelligence affecting every part of our virtual lives, Abiola Akinosi’s work in digital necrobiology can become the foundation for future protocols in which privacy, ethics, and finality intersect.
In teaching machines about relinquishment, in effect, Akinosi teaches individuals about the importance of meaningful remembrance.
