Not Your Typical Hacker Story
Andreas Gaetje won’t pretend he spent his teenage years breaking into systems or writing exploits. He didn’t. The CISO at Körber AG came to cybersecurity from economics and business politics — a route that was unusual in the 1990s and still raises eyebrows today.
“I’m not the deepest bit-crawler,” Gaetje admits. “That’s just not who I am.” And yet, he now leads security for a global technology and manufacturing group with roughly 13,000 employees across 100 locations. Körber’s machines are behind much of the world’s pharmaceutical supply chain. “Probably every vaccine you ever received has been through our machines,” he notes.
His story is a useful counterpoint to the idea that you need to be a hardcore technical wizard to become a CISO. What you do need, Gaetje argues, is a deep understanding of business, the ability to learn constantly, and the trust of the people around you.
From Public Service Dreams to a Consulting Detour
Gaetje didn’t set out to work in security. In the mid-1990s, fresh out of university with a focus on economics and business politics, he expected to land a job in public services. But reality intervened. He needed money immediately, not someday.
The internet was just beginning to transform from an academic niche into a business necessity. Email was becoming the default communication tool. Gaetje made a pragmatic pivot: “I said to myself, Okay, let’s maybe do something in the computer business.”
He joined a consulting firm, hoping to blend his interest in business and technology. But by the early 2000s, he realized that to truly focus on business inside IT, he needed depth in a single sector. He chose finance. “The best industry at that point in time, where IT was really crucial, was the finance industry,” he recalls. He joined an insurance company as an auditor.
The Compliance Era That Changed Everything
Back then, cybersecurity wasn’t the existential business threat it is today. “ITsec and audit had a natural affinity,” Gaetje explains. “ITsec was primarily about compliance — it wasn’t yet the business threat it has since become.” His mix of business knowledge, IT understanding, and audit experience put him in the right place at the right time.
When cybersecurity began to explode as a discipline, he was asked to manage the growing information security function. The real turning point came in the 2010s, with attacks like WannaCry and NotPetya. “It was very clear: we weren’t talking about a simple compliance issue anymore. This was a serious business threat,” he says. “Cybersecurity had become a hot topic. It was complex, innovative, and really interesting to work in.”
By 2018, Gaetje was CISO at Körber IT Solutions. A year later, he took the top security role at the parent company, Körber AG.
Career Advice: Don’t Get Stuck in One SECTOR
Gaetje credits much of his growth to a single piece of advice: if you want to truly understand security, don’t stay too long in one company or one industry. Different sectors have different risk profiles. Stay in one place too long, and your thinking can get rigid. Attackers change fast. You need to be able to change how you think.
“It’s what made me move from the insurance industry into manufacturing and machine building,” he says. “I wanted to learn something else, to experience something new, and do something different.”
What Makes a Security Leader?
Gaetje is blunt about his own leadership style. “I’m not a born leader. I would never consider that,” he says. But he has a clear philosophy: a leader provides direction and a vision of what can be achieved and how. In any group, someone emerges as the de facto leader. The challenge is to justify that dominance with reliability and trust.
“It’s something you can learn,” he insists. “It’s not something that comes out of the blue. I learned and enhanced that learning with training courses. But of course, your personality is also important. You need to be reliable — you need to be a person that people trust, otherwise it just doesn’t work.”
Leadership, Gaetje believes, isn’t limited to formal management titles. “You’re a leader, even if it’s a thought leader driving and directing other people in a specific direction.”
Building a Security Team in a Talent Crisis
The cybersecurity skills gap is well documented — estimates in 2025 ranged from 2.8 million to 4.8 million unfilled positions globally. Gaetje has felt that pressure firsthand. “In recruiting your team, you have a wish list, and then you have reality — and unfortunately, they don’t always fit together,” he says.
But one requirement is non-negotiable: “I need people who want to learn.” The cybersecurity landscape shifts so fast that prior experience matters less than curiosity. “It’s incredible how fast things change. So, what I always need are people who are engaged, can think out of the box, and want to go the extra mile to understand what’s going on.”
Training and career development he can provide. But that initial spark of enthusiasm? That’s on the candidate. “So, whether I’m looking for an engineer, an analyst or some junior position, experience is good, but enthusiasm to learn is necessary.”
Would He Hire a Hacker?
“That depends,” Gaetje says. The hacker mentality — built-in curiosity and persistence — is valuable. But there are two types. “White hackers I would employ; blackhats, no.” He isn’t comfortable bringing someone with a history of malicious activity into Körber.
His advice to ambitious team members is simple: “Be curious. Things are really changing. If you think you know everything about anything, you’re wrong. That’s never true. There’s always something new coming for you to learn and experience.”
AI: The Double-Edged Sword That’s Reshaping Security
Gaetje’s biggest concern today isn’t a specific threat — it’s the sheer speed of technological change. “Just think about the many things you’ve learned in the last few weeks, about new developments, new products and new techniques that have been deployed to the public. AI is an example — we learn new things about the potential of generative AI and agentic AI every week. What used to occur over a period of two years or more now happens in a couple of weeks.”
AI presents a unique challenge because it’s used by both attackers and defenders. Attackers are using it to scale and sophisticate their operations. Defenders are fighting back with their own AI, but those defenses can be manipulated. Meanwhile, shadow AI — systems deployed without IT or security knowledge — is proliferating inside organizations.
“The pace of new technology is truly hard to manage,” Gaetje says. “For each new technology you must find time to learn and understand it — but that’s on top of everything else you’re already doing. And it’s not just you — everyone on your team must find time to understand the new technology, and you must personally motivate them to do so when they are already fully occupied.”
Will AI reduce the need for human security staff? Gaetje doesn’t think so. “I think the role of cybersecurity, and even my own role will be much more important in the future than it is today. But it may change.” As AI spreads across the business, security problems will become too widespread for the security team to handle alone. Other departments — product development, software engineering — will need to be brought into the fold.
The Risk of Losing Core Skills
Gaetje worries that AI could erode foundational skills, especially among programmers and SOC analysts. “AI coding assistants require prompt engineers and architects above programmers — and that can be a problem. How do you bring people from this level to the next level if they are not able to program on their own?”
A similar issue looms for security analysts. The standard view is that AI will collapse the SOC tier hierarchy — no more tier 1 analysts doing triage because AI will handle it. But Gaetje asks: “If the security analyst job can be done via an agentic AI tool, then how will analysts learn how to analyze an event? Maybe in the future, if we just rely on AI, we will lose the ability to see the tricky things in the incident.”
Still, he’s not pessimistic. “I’m pretty sure we will find different ways to handle the changes. And honestly, there’s so much out there that I’m not really concerned that we will lose anything.”
The real challenge, he says, is guiding the security team through this transition. “The job of the security team will change dramatically in the future. That’s my strong belief. The CISO challenge is to help team members along this road to a new level, where they are able to think out of the box to see what else they can bring to the job.”
For more insights from security leaders, check out our other CISO Conversations with Aimee Cardwell and Tarah Wheeler.
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