Masaaki Oshiro

Masaaki Oshiro is the chief technology officer (CTO) of Palisade Bank Corporation, which he co-founded in 2016 with his wife Ashani Talwar. Known to the public as just "that computer guy who married Talwar", he is actually the mastermind behind Palisade's secure data storage facilities, Palisade Blades.

Background
Masaaki Oshiro grew up in his father's robotics factory and developed a fascination with computers. Prior to founding Palisade Bank Corporation, Masaaki Oshiro founded UNGYO, a data protection company, at age 19. When he met Ashani, the two were already among the wealthiest people in the world under age 30.

Oshiro's work as CTO of Palisade include designing and overseeing the security system of the Palisade Blade, reputedly the most secure data vault in the world. Notable, he designed the Lavawall, a firewall that utilizes an advanced AI to defend against hackers, and spearheaded the development of HeatEye sensors. To further secure the Blade against hackers, including a type of hackers known as "rippers," Oshiro secretly hired assassins to assassinate hackers. For this reason, Palisade is a company that all rippers hate.

Unknown to their clients, Oshiro and Talwar have backdoor access to all the clients' confidential information stored in the Blade, and use it for a massive insider trading scheme. When a Palisade engineer Simona Saridakis was close to discover this, Oshiro orchestrated her murder - he asked Simona to look into a maintenance issue in the server Chamber 209 and then manually overrode the security protocols to have her killed by automated security defenses. Simona's death was not properly investigated due to Czech Republic's corporate security laws, and Oshiro and Talwar subsequently used her death to promote the reliability of Palisade's security features. Oshiro also tried to pay off Simona's husband Niko Saridakis to keep quiet on the incident, but his offer was rejected.

Stanton Dowd figured out about the insider trading scheme and the Saridakis case, and blackmailed Oshiro and Talwar into making their clients' private information available to an external party, namely the Illuminati. Although Oshiro expresses great concern to Talwar about involving Dowd in the insider trading scheme, an encrypted e-mail found in a virtual-reality office belonging to Oshiro reveals that he is cooperating with Dowd, without Talwar's knowledge.

Trivia

 * Oshiro's first company, UNGYO, is named after - one of the guardian statues at the entrance of Buddhist temples in Japan.