What Microsoft Gaming CISO Temi Adebambo is up against

When Temi Adebambo became the first-ever CISO of Microsoft Gaming in 2024, he had a huge job ahead of him.

About six months before Adebambo took the position, Microsoft closed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, making it the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue.

“My first year was really spent harmonizing security governance across what was now more than 30 global game studios,” Adebambo told IT Brew, adding it was a “defining year” for the company to see what leadership would look like at the newly combined organization.

It’s just a game…or is it? Adebambo—who is a self-proclaimed gamer, playing anywhere between 10 and 20 hours per week—said the gaming industry is very “unique” compared to other industries. For starters, he is tasked with protecting real-time transactions, personal data, and financial information “all in the same space.”

“Unlike traditional enterprise security, you’re not protecting just corporate data and business operations. In gaming, you’re protecting…highly interactive 24/7 life services,” Adebambo said, adding that this industry has a “passionate, but sometimes adversarial player base.”

“Usually you don’t find a Bank of America customer trying to take down their home bank customer account,” Adebambo said. “But you find that in gaming.”

Despite its differences, Adebambo told us the industry isn’t immune to more traditional risks, including AI-enhanced attacks and breaches.

“On top of that, we have account takeovers, where people want to take over someone else’s account and then sell it,” Adebambo said. “We have people trying to use stolen credentials to penetrate our environment. And then we have people that are just trying to disrupt online gameplay.”

Adebambo said the stakes in the gaming industry aren’t just monetary, and that a large part of his job is protecting player trust: “When parents put their credit cards in the system to allow their kids to play, they’re expecting that credit card to stay secure. They’re not expecting to have an incident over a credit card they used for gaming.”

A seamless gaming experience. Gamers also don’t want to think about security while playing, according to Adebambo. He said Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative, a multi-year commitment to bolstering security across its organization, is one way the company helps to create a seamless yet secure gaming experience. Under the project, he said games are built with the concepts of “secure by design” and “secure by default” in mind.

“The default settings within our games, the default behavior of our games, is to remain secure,” Adebambo said. “And then lastly, we have to maintain secure operations, which is what I probably spend a good amount of my time in, which is making sure that we are listening to all of the telemetry from all of our devices.”

Up in the air? Rumors about the fate of Microsoft Gaming have been swirling around the industry after Xbox co-founder Seamus Blackley said the console would be “sunsetted.”

“I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night,” Blackley said in a recent interview with GamesBeat.

However, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an internal Q&A in March that the company is “long on gaming,” and that it would continue to invest in the division: “There are core identities in this company. I don’t think Microsoft will exist without these identities continuing to thrive.”