Combating Identity-Based Attacks with Okta’s Dor Fledel

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Tech Trunk tv. I'm really happy to have a first time guest on here.

His name is Do Fettle. Dore is senior Director of Product Management at Okta, and, uh, he comes to Okta as the, uh, co-founder of spra Security. We're gonna hear all about that, but first, let's welcome dor.

Hey, Dora, welcome to Tech Drug tv. Hey, n great to be here. Thanks for hosting.

My pleasure. It's great to have you on. So do, we're going to get into a, all of these things, but let's hear a little bit about your journey.

Uh, it sounded like you co-founded Spirit security, spirit security, and, and that was acquired by Okta. I don't know. Give, give us the history here.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. So, uh, I spent most of my, uh, adult life in cybersecurity. Uh, and one of the things that made me very passionate about it is that I felt like there is tremendous impact that we can drive using technology today.

And I found myself working with the best people I ever worked with by far. Uh, so that's always what, what motivated me. And I spent a, a relatively, uh, 11 years in the Israeli military in cybersecurity, and then, uh, continued, graduated my MBA here in the u United States University of Chicago, and, uh, then founded Spare Security.

And, uh, yeah, back then we were the first, we're gonna dive deeper into it, the first identity security, posture management in the market. Um, and they got very, very fast traction, very positive customer feedback. The space of identity is hot.

I can share more about that as well. And, uh, yeah, recently joined Okta and now running, uh, the product within Okta. Wonderful.

So Okta acquired Spirit, is that the situation? And when was that? Yeah, it was February, 2024.

So, uh, now six months. Almost six Months. Yeah.

Yeah, six months in two days. Congratulations. First of all, Zel tough as they say.

Yeah, yeah. In, in New York, right. But, um, you know, I've had a fair amount.

I, I, uh, was able lucky enough to sell a few companies and acquired a bunch of companies. com days, and you know, what they say, like a boat, the best days of the day you found it and the day you sell it in some regards. But it's also, it's also good that you kind of enable, you're able to follow your passion or follow your vision with the company now with Okta.

Yeah, right. So you get to, you have more resources, a bigger boat now. Um, so yeah, congratulations to you.

Most of our audience, I'm sure is familiar with Okta, but for those who maybe aren't or they think they know what, you know, they're not a hundred percent sure, why don't you give them a little Okta background, if you don't mind? For sure. For sure.

So I'll give some background and also say where do we relate there? So in general, Okta is today the, the leading, uh, identity company. What does it actually mean, uh, to the audience?

So you can actually roughly segment the world to two, the workforce side. So for example, John, who works in, uh, a JP Morgan bank and goes there and he uses the workforce side of the house. You can also segment to the consumer and customer side of the house.

So think about each one of us who has a JP Morgan Chase, a Chase account and just logs in through their phone every day to check their balances. So this is how the world divides in general. Okta plays at both.

It started more on the workforce side when it provided a very seamless experience of a single sign-on. So the team who founded the company really were visionaries in identity about the, the risks in passwords and the lack of efficiencies that we have as we create so many users all across. And in a way they forged themselves the identity space and the, the identity, especially in the workforce, and then also expanded to the customer side.

So today, Okta, many probably know it, uh, as a single sign-on or a a such a solution. But it actually offers a very extensive suite that is mostly catered to two main personas. One is identity and security teams allowing them to manage correctly and adhere to standards in the identity, the workforce identity world.

And the second is the end users. It means the employees of the organization who interact with the Okta system as they log in every day and have seamless experiences that really accelerate the business and the revenue, uh, that's generated. Wonderful.

Okay. com. Do let us now jump into ISPM, our identity security posture management.

A lot of people in our off in our audience have heard of it. A lot of people probably have it. How would you, let's define it first.

How would you define ISPM? Yes. So in general, security posture management is not a no approach.

The, the question that posture management really helps security teams is to get visibility and understanding of their lay of the land, what's happening, where are the top gaps and risks and help to proactively address them before they become a breach in the sock. So, for example, think about an analogy of a soc and poster management is a lock to the house. A lock to the house prevents the, the burglar from going in.

Poster management is like the lock, and then you have security cameras. This is what usually happens in the sock. This is like, okay, an intruder is already in, we want to understand where did they go and what did they grab.

But most of us common ordinary people in real life actually manage their security with posture management approaches. Like, I have a lock on my door. I have two, I have, uh, one, uh, downstairs as well.

So really helping security teams to be ahead of the game before a breach happens, before things become statistical and hard to find. And you're already cutting your losses to be proactive and pre prevent the burglar from getting in from the get go. So this is the posture management approach.

What spra security and now part of Okta Identity security, posture management is bringing that approach exactly. To identity. What does that mean?

Every, so you see, and that's why we started a company, we saw the identity breaches are on the rise. More than 80% of the breaches have an identical an an identity component into them. And with the sprawl of SaaS cloud and identities in general, we just see it going up and up in the future.

So the main thing that we help the security teams and now lead the industry with is how can we help identity security teams be very proactive about the identity attack sources? Very two common, two use cases that when I speak to security leaders, everyone says they have them. They know they have them.

The question is more about how can we make something out of it? And we can dive deeper into that in a second, but like, admin sprawl is very, very common. Someone is added to a back door as an admin in the end of the month on a fired drill because production was down, for example, or another one, which is MFA bypasses when local accounts are instant.

And, uh, when people are bypassing the multifactor authentication MFA in your environment, and they go around the process and that just, you know, leads to, to the bridges that we've seen recently. Sure. So, man, I thought we were past, everybody's an admin kinda stuff, right?

Uh, who's that's been going on forever and ever. I, I've been in security 25 years and, you know, I I thought we hammered that into people's heads, you know, least privileged access kinda stuff. Um, I'm surprised to hear that it, it's still happening, but I mean, I guess why shouldn't I be surprised be because this is, I, look, we have a small nothing of a company here, you know, maybe 30 people.

Yeah. But when there's a deadline or something needs figured done, all of a sudden you start taking Yeah. And identity is in this very complicated pool, like anything in security, but identity is so simple to understand that there is a pool between locking the castle and no one gets in, no one gets out and, and improving efficiency.

And one of the biggest things that we're doing, and you know, customers told us, listen, identity, the admins role list privilege, those are things that are the foundations of our existence as security teams. They call it many times the bare bones of security. And we're not talking about like a CVE fifth derivative problem in one server.

We're talking about how many admins can access and read the emails, The keys to the kingdom. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and the main thing that really dictated our approach because of that, because everyone agrees on the problem, it just that in the cloud and SaaS world, it became really complicated to solve that question is our why. How are we helping security teams to be more secure to more than they are today with a reasonable investment they can make. This really maps into the, the pace of integration to prioritization and contextualization that they can actually go and remediate items and into more automations that really helps them instead digging themselves and reinventing the wheel for every problem, actually giving them an out of the box approach with best practices, with standards that can be highly repeatable in scale.

And that's the secret sauce. Got it. So as we do, as we mentioned in the top of the interview, you're still able to, you're the product manager, you're running the product still same product you had at Experia.

Like what do you see changing what, what, what, how have, you know, being an Octa now six months, six months is a drop in the bucket, but Yeah. You know, what, what's changed? What, what I'm hoping be for the better.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think the biggest thing that I heard from customers is, is actually that they just want it, like, as a startup, every startup, regardless of spare, regardless of who you are, your outlets and channels to get to the right, people who really care are really limited. Like, you know, how can, like advertisement, marketing, all those things, they, they go a long way, but they're bounded.

You know, today there are so many vendors, people want in general to consolidate vendors to get to more efficient place in, in their eyes not to deal with 500 different things. And one of the things we're really hearing from customers is we just wanted Okta to deliver it. Uh, so, uh, so we're obviously taking a lot, a lot of feedback about things because every, in, every m and a, the customer slightly shifts.

There are people who really go risk full forward and buy from a startup they never heard of. And, and, uh, the current Okta buyers, not all of them are like that. Uh, so we got more outlets, more options and more interesting conversations to get into.

But in general, we, uh, we just feel that the market is there and that there are many things we can accomplish with the customers and have a lot of, uh, great security outcomes. See, I haven't mentioned ai. You're my first interview all day.

They didn't mention ai. How can AI help us here with I-I-I-S-P-M? Yeah, for sure.

So we're actually proud to say that we're the first, uh, heavy LLM usage in Okta. Uh, like as, as a backend to the product. Uh, we, we have a heavy LLM uh, um, capability around the tagging accounts.

We can dive, I can share more, but tagging accounts really helps security teams understand the boundaries and constraints on every account. And we really use a high tech LLM for that. Uh, on top of it, just in general, the product had AI from day one.

Uh, we didn't wait for further the revolution because today our biggest, as I said, prioritization is the key. And the main way we're doing prioritization is by understanding attack chains, blast radios, those kinds of things that really augment and synthesize a lot of information. Yeah.

Our joke internally is that we're a data company just in the cybersecurity identity space and our, we're all Data companies. Yeah. Because I, I think that's one of the big revelations is people forget, none of this stuff works without data.

You know, we got so focused on apps Yeah. Building the apps and, and all and using apps, but the apps are just the gateway to the data. Yep.

Yeah. And, and what a ci o of the ciso I really like told me, uh, two months ago, he said, the problem goes beyond what a spreadsheet and two analysts can, can solve. And that's where data comes in.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, do I want to thank you for coming on Techstrong TV and, and telling and teaching us a little bit. I, uh, ISPM best of luck to you continuing at Okta and continuing developing the, the, the ISPM uh, product there.

And, uh, maybe we'll see you at the US Open. Yeah, For sure. For sure.

All righty. Thank you very much. Have a great day.

You too. Dole Senior director of product management at Okta. Co-founder of spear security expert on identity security posture management.

This Alan Shimmel will be back in a moment with more on Techstrong tv.