Aviva Zacks had the chance to interview David Feldman, CEO of Cybonet, and to pick his brain about how his company is changing the cyber landscape for the better.
Safety Detective: How did you get into cybersecurity and what do you love about it?
David Feldman: Life took me to cybersecurity as I was studying political science and geography at university, but I have been working with computers and fixing stuff since the nineties. It got me more and more into network security and part of network security is dealing with malware.
What I love about it is that every day brings more news. It never ends and it never stops. You will always hear about something new, some new tricks.
SD: Can you tell me how Cybonet protects its customers’ networks?
DF: Cybonet has been around since 2002 and has been working in the world market since 2005. For the last 15 years, we have been dealing with email security. Once the email security market shifted a few years ago, we went into network security. In cybersecurity, when you reach that area of the market, you understand that technically either the customer is infected now, or he will get infected. Market research shows that the levels of detection of antiviruses today is between 30 to 40% of customers’ devices getting infected on a daily basis. When you understand that, you need to give them coverage of their entire network and try to look at the network from all angles in order to see if they’re infected.
We provide a solution called Cybowall, which detects and protects customers from malicious activity. Cybowall monitors the organization’s networks to make sure that the attacker is tracked. If a computer is hacked or a file is infected, we will detect that.
SD: What are the industries that would use your software or your solution?
DF: We work with any type of company, from small SMB market organizations of 25 computers to big municipalities, cities, or banks with thousands of devices and multiple networks. Our advantage is that you don’t need to install anything on computers.
Our entire goal is to simplify security for organizations. Imagine an organization that employs 20 people and has a yearly turnover between $1 million to $10 million. They cannot afford very expensive cybersecurity solutions that may cost $100,000 dollars because not only are these expensive solutions difficult to manage, they require a person on-site to manage them entirely.
We understand that they don’t know a lot and they need it to be simple and this is exactly what we have created. A unified solution that looks at multiple areas within your organization and provides a wide answer to wide problems in network security.
SD: How do you think that the cybersecurity landscape is going to change over the next few years?
DF: The biggest problem is that people are “clicking” on stuff that they don’t understand. I’ll give you an example: When we were taking driver’s education in Israel, we were taught that in order to make sure we were driving at a safe distance from the car ahead, we were told to say the words “21, 22,” or in Hebrew – “Esrim V’Echad, Esrim U’Shtayim.” This way, we knew that we had enough distance and could stop in time, in order to prevent an accident.
We need to teach our users to do the same thing. If you see a message with an attachment, count to 5 before clicking on it.
Today cyber-criminal activity is bigger than any organized crime out there in the physical world. It makes sense financially to hack you and to steal information from you. Challenges will only get smarter and more complicated to identify.