Unveiling the Future of Cyber – Zohar Alon, Cybereason

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techron tv.

You know, my next guest is someone I had the pleasure of meeting. It's gotta be, I don't know, nine, 10 years ago, maybe more, more, 12, 15 years ago. Anyway, he, he doesn't need an introduction to those insiders in the cyber world.

His name is Zohar Alon Zohar. Well, he's gonna tell you about his newest role, but I first met Zohar. He was the founder of a company called Dome Nine.

And what I loved about Dome Nine is in, you know, 2006, the cloud is taking up, taking off, and people are still trying to figure out, well, how do I do security in the cloud? I don't have my Moten castle. I got a firewall and I put a firewall in the cloud.

The very first time I heard about a, a cloud firewall, if you will, was from this gentleman right here. Um, Zohar, I don't wanna embarrass you, but he saw Zo. Dom know was eventually, it Was was 2010.

It was, it, it was 2010, but, but That was 2010. It took four years for us to figure that out. Um, Zo was acquired by Checkpoint, and then, um, Zohar of course stayed there and, and did many other things, but he's here with us now.

Zohar alone of Cybereason. Welcome. How are you, my friend?

I, I'm doing great. Thank you, Alan. It's so good to have you here.

Zohar. You are. Well, you know what, why don't you introduce your new role and tell us about it.

Good. Okay, so, uh, so I now essentially run product and, and r and d for Cybereason. Uh, Cybereason is a 800 people, well over a hundred million dollars in a r r, uh, cybersecurity company, one of the pioneers of the endpoint detection and response, uh, category.

Today, it's, we call it, you know, endpoint prevention and Endpoint and E D R E P P and E D R together. Um, you know, if you've played with PCs since you're a kid like me, you know, the first thing you would install after crafting a new PC was, you know, where I get the, the latest antivirus to play with. And I think in my, in my career, I've, I had a chance to touch 40 different brands, and I'm not exaggerating.

This was my, my fetish actually. Um, I started my cyber career checkpoint in 96, so it's, uh, going to be, uh, know, 27 years in the business. And, um, uh, about a half a year, half a year ago, I got the chance to join Cybereason as part of the, a new investment round led by SoftBank and, uh, uh, taking the company, you know, to, to its full potential leading the site here in Tel Aviv, uh, as part of our global expansion.

Excellent. I couldn't pick a better person. Look, let, let, let's go through a little bit, right?

It's funny you said 96. 96 is actually when I first started my very first internet company called Tristar Web in Silicon Alley downtown Manhattan. I sold it in 97.

It was SoftBank company, a SoftBank backed company at the time. My friend Brad Feld was the managing partner at SoftBank Venture Capital. And, uh, they bought the company and we were doing this roll up company that called Inter Reliant, and we became one of the first managed checkpoint firewall.

That's me folks. That's my product. That's my first, Yeah.

So this is 98, 99, something like that. It was, it was fun times. Yeah.

So it's funny how we parallel like that. Now, Cybereason on the other hand though, played more as you said, endpoint, right? And, and the endpoint game is, look, we all played with AV when we were younger, right?

Because we wanted to see if it was real and signature based AV and heuristic based AV and, and all of these different things. And a lot of us came to the conclusion, we don't know really how good it is is back early on, right? And is it even worth it?

And then, you know, that, that for a while, the whole endpoint security game, sorta, when Microsoft started giving away free and everything, it, it went through a change. But now we have a new generation, and Cybereason's probably the leader of that, right? Endpoint detection and response as you mentioned.

Um, but Cybereason itself, as you mentioned, went through sort of a, a, a re a shuffle of management, recapitalization of refocusing on what's a very dynamic and changing market, right? Um, my my question for you is, look, you are, you're an entrepreneur at heart. You're, you've, you've done the big companies, you've done startups.

What, what about this opportunity kind of said, Hey, this is something I want to sink my teeth into. This is something I really want to do. So, you know, the, when people, I started Dome nine in 2010 when we kind of first met, and the, the zero to one or $2 million was a long and tough stretch.

Yeah. It took almost, uh, six and a half years. And, and we died twice.

We, we almost went background twice. We got a failed acquisition attempt for under $10 million. It was a very tough, uh, six and a half year run.

But, uh, when we got the $2 million run rate, and I kind of, I saw how I, from a product techie, I start, you know, run and operate this machine sales, machine commercial doing scaling r and d. You know, we grew from about, uh, 30 people to 110, and we almost went 10 x on revenue. We started 2017 with $2 million of a r r.

And by the time we closed the deal at Checkpoint, we were closer to 18. This was a nine x in under 24 months. And I can tell you, this was the time where I felt kind of the most productive, the when you are facing new challenges, but you realize that a lot of your experience is kind of coming into, into play.

Mm-hmm. You know, this situation, a commercial situation, a customer wants a two year deal, you wanna make it a three year deal. All those, all those things where you combine, you know, a knowledge with technology and, and understanding of the cyber world with, with, with how we can really do business and monetizing this.

And, and it's a lot about people. You know, as you grow, you spend way, you know, more and more energy on, on motivating people, on hiring them, on, on scaling them together with you. And I felt great.

You know, this was, uh, you know, actually from the entrepreneurial perspective, the minute your company gets acquired, you in many cases, a lot of those responsibilities have been taken from you. So, I, I, throughout my time at Checkpoint, and even after I left Checkpoint, I knew that if there will come an opportunity to kind of go back to the scale game, go back to the problem solving game, as much as I like being techie as a, as much as my, my whiteboard here is filled with, you know, uh, design ideas on, on a new backend or how we implement AI and all that, you know, the real, the real fun or the real pleasure of executing comes from operating this, this big machine and essentially motivating people and helping them scale and, and help us grow. And, um, you know, I, I had a chance to say no to a couple of, you know, less, you know, less interesting opportunities as a c e O role or, or things like that.

But it was really a crossroad where you go be, you know, a full-time investor because I did, uh, a lot of investing, uh, in my time in Checkpoint, and after, after the acquisition, of course, um, either so, so I did this. So either started something new, you know, you can get, I can probably find some VCs that will give you, that will give me, uh, $20 million on a, on a blank PowerPoint. Uh, you know, if I'm in that mm-hmm.

I couldn't find an idea to that would, that would, you know, convince me to do so. You know, even though it's very flattering that you get the blank check as a repeat entrepreneur is somebody with experience. And, uh, so, so no, nothing kind of got me extremely energized about, but I had also chance to, to help, uh, uh, seed three companies with the ideas I was parting of the founding team.

I'm now service an active chairman of. But for me, this is a kind of, you know, being an entrepreneur through somebody else, through, through a young team that is, is doing it for the first time, and I can help them, right? But kind of for, for zoar for myself now, the minute I saw the quality, so SoftBank called me and helped them in the due diligence process before, a hundred million dollars round that they led essentially this, this April.

And during that process, I met really talented team, amazing technology, and also I saw why, you know, most of the endpoint security solutions out there do not have the, the, the capacity, the, the technology needed for a true E D r for a true detection and response backend. In this business, we, we analyze tremendous amounts of data. It's an expensive operation, but the assumption is that for some, an attack that nobody knew before, or something that was, you know, u utilizing exploit that were just discovered, only a true e d R solution can help you find it as quickly as possible.

And then remediate and then response. This is the r media, the response, okay, we can try and prevent as much as we want, but the assumption is that we will get it. When you have customers with hundreds of thousands of endpoints that rely on you, they rely on the availability of your infrastructure and the technology of those endpoints as, as they grow.

You know, this is, this is exactly the, the challenge that I needed. And combined with the, with the great team and the new funding and the new energy, and essentially the, the re reigniting, the, the innovation, I couldn't resist the, the opportunity. So I'm, I'm very selfish by, by picking this, I, I, I can't wipe the smile of my face.

And I'm in this almost, almost five months now, and I'm still smiling. Excellent. Excellent.

Um, let, let's jump in a little bit into Cybereason product. Um, you mentioned ai, of course, AI is on everybody's mouth these days, but you know what, in this situation where you're evaluating what you, well, you have to a, gather them being analyzed, large volumes of data, machine learning, AI is, is a Must using it for, for many. Yeah.

It's not new. You know, the generative AI and the fact that different, you know, we can both explain to our wives, why is it so amazing? Without there having any technological knowledge, you can just see it.

Yep. Um, so, so I think it, it helps, you know, it adds a lot of, you know, the misuse of the terminology. But, you know, that's part of the game and I'm, I'm happy with it.

But yeah, in our prevention models, and you know, today you fight, you know, when you, you are dealing with detection, a false positive is, uh, is something that can be, uh, very negative. Uh, but, uh, uh, a false negative when you, when you don't find, uh, when you don't find something that really happened is also that's even worse. So by, by using machine learning, by correlating a lot of data, by training models based on, not scenarios that we've seen in the past, but the way those things are, the way a new exploit is getting can come to market or can come to, to attack, uh, uh, essentially a workstation or a, or a network, we, we can deploy or we are deploying those technologies to help us find them in the, in the most accurate way.

It's not a hundred percent game. As I said, if this was a hundred percent game, the we don't need detection. You know, we can prevent everything, but that's not the case.

So we, we rely on the fact that in the data, in the vast amounts of data we collect from the sensors that our customers put with there, as part of our endpoint security piece, we will find, we'll be able using machine learning to, to correlate events that in hindsight would say, oh, this is exactly how an exploit behaves. But nobody has seen this behavior before. It happened first.

And, you know, unfortunately, or fortunately, you know, we are in this growing business, the industry that's will continue to grow our, our digital footprint is only is, is only growing and probably, probably exponentially still. So, so, you know, the attackers now, when they can monetize, when, when, when you can make money over hurting people's cyber security posture or exploiting their, uh, their weaknesses, um, whether for financial gain or for for some other gain, you know, we will be there as, as the, the frontline. And, and I'm happy to say that, that there is, you know, the, the endpoint market is not over.

But nevertheless, we also have, uh, what we call our X D R solution where you can not just, we can combine all the knowledge from the endpoints, which is the, the vast amount of data, also with knowledge of all your other security, uh, and perimeter, uh, technologies, your traditional firewalls, your sss, s e uh, your, your email security in the cloud, your logs from, from your A w s or, or Azure or G C P, and bring them all together with the data that we have as we already have this tremendous data lake. And then gain an additional insights on attack in a, in a more unified way. And again, this is a market that's, you know, I think is still still in, in its beginning.

And when you can, you know, we, as somebody that, that really brought to market the first C S P M and the first, uh, managed firewall solution for MSPs, uh, 20 years ago, I, I still, I still, I feel that, you know, the same thing happens here. I think that there is so much to, to to be discovered, to, to make accessible to, to customers, to CISOs, to security and SOC teams out there. And that's, you know, again, I'm, I can't, I can't fake the, the way I feel about helping, uh, create new categories there.

And it's, it's really a huge market. So I'm, I know, I, I agree. And I, we're outta time here, so I'm gonna have to have you come back on, 'cause I want to discuss, 'cause in my mind, look, the, the natural progression is we move from E D R to X D R E D R is like a subcategory here.

And this is true in security, right? What, what, what's a product today becomes a feature. E E D R is one.

The, the X D R you're gonna need for the total, uh, picture Zah, we're going to, we'll schedule another one. I want to jump more into that and more about Cybereason, but we gotta, uh, end here real quickly. People want to get more information on Cybereason.

com. Yes. com.

Yeah. Yep. Zohar alone President product r and d for Cybereason here on Tech Drunk tv.

We'll be right back in just a minute.