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RSAC Innovation Sandbox Finalist: Mitiga with CTO, Ofer Maor · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Cybersecurity Go to Market Podcast for a special showcase episode where we're talking to leaders of the companies selected for the 2024 RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: These are the very, very few, in fact, just 10 companies the judges have selected out of hundreds, if not over a thousand, as the most innovative startups in cybersecurity today.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and today we're talking with Ofer Ma'or, CTO and co-founder of Mitigka.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Ofer, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, and thanks for having me here.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is an exciting time, I'm sure, for Mitigah, right?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Getting selected down to just the last 10.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's a that's a hella heck of an accomplishment for you all.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is very, very exciting.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, first question for you, Ofer.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Where in the world did you have your first sandbox?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I grew up in Israel in Haifa.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh the third largest city, it's in the north of the country.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I grew up in a pretty good home.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Both of my parents are PhDs, one in physics, one in chemistry.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, no pressure growing up at all.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and in fact, I I always joke that I'm the black sheep of the family because everybody else in my family, my sister, my brother in law, everybody's got PhDs, uh, and I just went to do companies instead.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're just a a merely successful founder of a startup or two.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's if you're the black sheep, then that's uh that's a heck of a position to be in.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I, you know, it's not too bad.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my sister actually was on a cruise in the Mediterranean last year and they stopped in at Haifa for a day, and she said it was awesome.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: She loved it.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a it's a harbor town.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's um it's on a mountain by the beach.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, really nice.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: She sent me a picture of this huge staircase as a huge road that goes straight down from uh up in the mountain somewhere, is that right?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the business side then.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: What's the story of the founding of the company?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's pretty funny.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I have two co-founders, uh, Tal and Ariel.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Tal and I had two other companies before, which uh we we sort of spin out one out of the other and sold both of them.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we were both working at two big corporates um after selling the two companies, and then we both decided to to leave.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been talking very kind of far as, you know, we need to leave, do something new.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, at a cruise in the Maldives, scuba diving cruise, and I get a call from Tal.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you know, this VC introduced me to this other guy from 8200, right?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: You need to have one of those in the founding team.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we should start a company.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: You're in.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: I said, well, sure.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I spend half of the cruise between dives going on con calls trying to figure out what what is the company that we're building.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I've never heard of someone doing conference calls between scuba dives.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's a that's a great situation to be in.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can't do them while scuba diving.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't work.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: I once did a forecast call from a cheerlift at a ski resort.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh not not quite the same, but you know, I could do that at the same time, right?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I could uh I could actually talk, which was uh which was fun.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: So uh what's the problem over that you're solving at Middigun?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Who cares about it?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Who are you solving this problem for?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody cares about it.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the problem is That's a problem.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's the problem right there.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's a problem.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is that uh, you know, we're moving to the cloud.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: Every everybody gets that, right?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and for some years now, we've built as an industry right now, we uh as an industry, we've built technologies to help us build more secure and robust cloud environments.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: But what we haven't done is help the other side of the security, the security operations, the people that need to respond to breaches and incidents.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't given them any tools to move to the cloud.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the attackers are now moving to the cloud as well.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so as attackers are moving to the clouds, attacks are going big, and the teams, our last line of defense, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: The the people, the security operations, the defenders, the people that sit in 24-7 shifts and try to stop attacks, don't have the right tools to deal with attacks in the cloud.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the problem we're solving.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: So these companies have deployed, you know, pick your economy, uh, ASPM, CSPM, DSPM, right?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: But it's still obviously there's going to be attacks and they need to be able to have a way to respond.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you're giving them what, like a dashboard, like a tool set that enables them to watch and then take action.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: So so if you if you think about the SPMs of the world, right?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Asterisk SPMs, um, it's posture, right?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: They help you, they tell you when something is open.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Think of it, you know, in a physical world.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Think of it somebody coming to look at your bank and says, oh, you're missing bars on this back door, somebody can go in.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: But they don't deal with what happens once somebody gone in.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then the people who have to defend, they need different tools.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the cloud being the cloud is big, complex, so many different types of services.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they need tools that can make sense out of this scale and complexity, just like we needed them right for the posture side.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's what posture tools did.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: We need that for detection and response.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and that's what we're giving.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's, you know, of course there's dashboards and stuff, but the essence is giving them the right context, the right information out of, you know, insane amounts of information that's out there in the cloud, giving the right information, contextualized, so that they can understand what's going on and respond to it quickly in seconds, in minutes, because you don't have time.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: Everything goes really fast in the cloud.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea of detection response obviously has been around for a while.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're bringing it to the cloud.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: What is the big innovation about how you do that, though, at the scale and speed of the cloud world that the judges would have looked at and said, there's our finalist right there?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: So there are three big parts that everybody talking about the cloud in every aspect will tell you, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's scale, complexity, and expertise.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the three things that are different in the cloud.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: The mass amounts of services, servers, workloads, everything in the cloud, the complexity.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So there isn't just like, you know, here's 100,000 million or sorry, 100,000 uh Windows machines, but there are machines of different sizes, types, Kubernetes, EC2s, multi-cloud, SaaS services, IaaS, identity, all that.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then the people don't have the expertise.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: So our innovation is about taking all that and making it so it's easy to understand what's going on.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: How do we do that?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: We're able to collect insane amounts of data.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: We have already petabytes of data, something that normal security operation tools uh can't deal with.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: We make sense out of the complexity.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: We've spent years in research.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's, you know, we've been around for four years.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: We have a big research team.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: All we do is research how do attacks in the cloud look like.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: We build what we call the cloud attack scenario library.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we understand how it looks, how it manifests through the different data sources.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then we bring just cherry-pick the pieces of data that are relevant for an attack and put them in front of you.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it could be pieces of data that come from 20 different sources.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was just showing demos in the last few days to a bunch of people, and everybody's around looking like, wow, this gives me, you know, in one view, something that could take me a day to investigate on my own.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's assuming you know what you're doing.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And is your vision then that you're enabling existing operations center folks who perhaps aren't cloud experts to become obviously much more uh rich and expert in the cloud world, or are you trying to enable cloud experts, cloud security experts to be able to do that?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Both.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the big challenge is how to enable those that are not experts.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the experts, they could probably get it done.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: It will take them a lot longer without our our solution, but they could get it done.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: The non-experts, they just can't get it done.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't have enough cloud experts to work in SecOps.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Keep in mind SecOps, and especially SOC analysts, is a fairly entry-level job to begin with.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, you know, there are senior SecOps individuals.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but SOC analysts, the people that do the 24-7 shifts, it's, you know, it's it's a career starting job.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Over time, people get better, and and most of them will leave to the more senior IR jobs or or go into other areas of security.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: And and even if you're very good, being able to understand how attacks look like in a hundred different cloud services is an impossible task.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the buyer is who, the stock leader, or does it go higher than that?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's between the stock leader and the CISOs because what we see is that a lot of CISOs today understand that they have gap in in SecOps in the cloud.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so this the SecOps people obviously want the tools to help them do their job.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: The CISOs want to know that they have coverage for attacks in the cloud.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things we're actually doing for CISOs, uh, which our customers really love, is on top of this platform, we we automate a lot of the detection, of course.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: But whenever something big happens, right, like the last Sysens breach or the last MGM breach or Microsoft Storm or Midnight Blizzard, anything you know you hear in the news, let's call it this way, we build specific detection for that within hours after it it blows up, and we run it for our customers and we deliver them within the platform a report that says where they stand in regard to that.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Are they impacted, not impacted, should they investigate further?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this is extremely valuable because what happens in these cases today is that the CISO gets a call from a board member or a CEO or somebody that doesn't really know security, and all they care about is like, is this impacting us?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like I heard on the Wall Street Journal that MGM got breached.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so we give a lot of value there for the CISO as well, and of course for the Secop team.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a powerful use case right there.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Take take the board, take the CEO, the CFO off my back, please, with a simple, easy-to-read report.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: I can definitely see the value in that.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: When we're looking at 2024 over, what's the big goals for the company for the rest of the year?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we're growing, we're growing really fast.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: We are expanding now a lot in the big companies, the Fortune 500s.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, when we were younger, most of the companies that were looking at you know, SecOps at the cloud were more of the technology born in the cloud type of companies.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: But now as cloud attacks are on the rise and everybody's moving substantially to the cloud, uh, we're going um more and more into large organizations.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so our goal is to grow, um, do more integrations uh with the rest of the ecosystem uh and the SecOP you know workflow and lifecycle and be able to help more and more organizations respond to to breaches in the cloud because they're coming.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's it's a real problem.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at some of the stats, it's actually really interesting if if you're familiar with with IBM's cost of data breach report.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: They did publish it year over year.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: The last two years they started asking about cloud.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: In 2022, 45% of breaches had a part in the cloud.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Last year it was 82%, so double in one year.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: And cloud breaches take longer to respond to, longer to detect, and because of that, they cost more.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Their impact is higher.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we really look to help organizations reduce the impact of their cloud breaches.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it sounds like expansion and headcount growth uh is what you're after, of course, right?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's the that's that's where you're going.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like every startup.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And let's talk about RSA.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we got it coming up now in less than two weeks.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Gosh, it's it's coming up fast.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Except for the wild celebrations of winning the sandbox, what else do you guys have planned for that week?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we have a very busy uh RSA.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, on top of the sandbox, um, I have two other talks I'm doing at RSA.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I usually speak at RSA.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: I got two talks accepted this year.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so Monday I'm doing the sandbox, Tuesday one talk, Wednesday the other talk.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Gonna be busy.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we have a pretty exciting booth where we'll show all our stuff.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're interested and this appeals to you, by all means come and get a demo.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and you know, a bunch of events, VC events, uh customer meetings, the usual stuff you you do in a conference.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, I wish you a huge uh success for the year.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Good luck for this soundbox.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you get your name in lights, not just doing the presentation, but actually getting into the final two and then hopefully winning the whole thing.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I wish you success for that and for the rest of the year.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: See you.