If you don’t think like a hacker, you won’t win • The Register

interview In response to Remedio CEO Tal Kollender, the one strategy to beat the dangerous guys hacking into company networks is to “suppose like a hacker,” and since not everyone seems to be a teenage hacker turned cybersecurity startup chief govt, she constructed an AI to do that.

“My thought was: if I’ve a hacker mindset, why not adapt it into protection,” Kollender informed The Register. “As a result of should you do not suppose like a hacker, you will not be capable to beat them, proper?”

We sat down (nearly) with Kollender to debate her former life hacking video video games and the way that led her to start out Remedio (previously Gytpol). The startup lately raised $65 million in its first-ever funding spherical on a $300 million valuation, and its purchasers embrace family names Colgate-Palmolive and Kraft Heinz.

“Curiosity is the secret,” she mentioned. “I used to be at all times curious. What introduced me to what I do now’s fixing some issues from a unique angle.”

For instance: one plus one equals two. “However as a way to get to 2, you do not actually need one plus one,” Kollender mentioned. “There are different methods – two plus zero minus two plus 4. There are numerous choices to get to the outcomes.”

Her first lesson on this got here from an Israeli on-line recreation that Kollender describes as a cross between Tetris and Icy Tower. She had been ranked No. 1, after which in a single day, an unknown participant beat her. “I used to be fairly jealous and upset, and on the similar time I mentioned, ‘there is not any means somebody can beat me as a result of I am the very best.'”

The opposite participant’s “inconceivable” rating led her to determine methods to hack into the sport’s database and write her personal inconceivable rating, earlier than transferring on to hacking Sony PlayStation video games, chat apps, and telephones. 

Later, whereas serving within the Israeli Air Power and coaching to turn into a fighter pilot, the Israel Protection Forces reassigned her to the IT Corp Cyber Safety-Techniques Division.

On the defender aspect and within the non-public sector, Kollender beforehand labored as a system safety architect at Dell EMC earlier than beginning her personal firm with co-founders Gilad Raz and Yakov Kogan in 2019.

“We wished to alter the way in which firms sort things, with none enterprise disruption,” she mentioned. To this finish, Remedio makes use of AI to seek out and auto-remediate vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, weak controls, compliance gaps, and different safety threats throughout company units.

As criminals more and more use AI to do these similar issues – scan for vulnerabilities, lacking patches, and misconfigurations – it turns into a battle of AI versus AI, and a race between defenders and attackers.

Digital intruders used to interrupt into networks and spend months snooping round, looking for credentials to permit lateral motion and steal helpful information. “Now, they do it in weeks or days. That is how briskly AI has made issues,” Kollender mentioned. “And if defenders do not sustain the tempo and develop” their very own utilization of the know-how, “then the attackers would possibly beat us.”

As a number of former teenage hackers discovered of their adolescence, Kollender refuses to get beat at her personal recreation, whether or not that is a online game or cyber protection. ®