Sony,
the New York Times, Wells Fargo, the Bank of America and government
webmasters across the world have found out the hard way that no computer
network is immune to savvy hackers seeking to steal information and
identities, compromise security or paralyze business.
As
the global threat of cyber-attacks grows exponentially, so do companies
that develop software to fight them off. Some of the world’s oldest and
best-trusted players are headquartered in Israel (beginning with Check
Point Technologies, founded in 1993), or have R&D operations here.
“Everybody
understands that you buy Swiss watches from Switzerland and information
security from Israel,” says Udi Mokady, CEO of CyberArk Software, Israel’s largest private cyber-security company since IBM’s recent acquisition of Israeli financial data security firm Trusteer. IBM now plans to open a cyber-security software lab in Israel.
Mokady
notes that Israelis have had to innovate in both physical and cyber
security in order to stay a step ahead of threats. “It’s a big part of
our edge, and the customers know it,” says the CEO, who served in a
military intelligence unit and holds degrees in law and management.
The
term “cyber-attack” was not in everyone’s vocabulary in 1999, when
Mokady co-founded CyberArk. Now it employs 300 people worldwide, half of
them in the Petah Tikva R&D center that is hiring an additional 50
workers as the latest version of CyberArk’s security software suite
rolled out last month. More than 40 percent of the Fortune 100 and 17 of
the world’s 20 largest banks are counted among its 1,400 customers.
Until
a couple years ago, Mokady tells ISRAEL21c, investment dollars have
supported solutions directed at keeping infiltrators out. CyberArk
instead developed award-winning software that “locks up” critical IT
infrastructure, monitoring and recording everything done with data
accessed by authorized (“privileged”) users on-premise, off-premise or
in the cloud.
CyberArk Israel’s Chen Bitan, right, with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Erel Margalit of JVP Venture Capital.
“Given
the amount of sophisticated attacks out there, the border between
insider and outsider has disappeared,” Mokady says. This has led to
greater demand for “inside-out” solutions.
JVP Cyber Labs
“CyberArk
was the first to recognize the significant vulnerability of privileged
access accounts,” says Nimrod Kozlovsky of Jerusalem Venture Partners
(JVP), one of the company’s main backers along with Goldman Sachs. “A
large part of most attacks we see relate to abusing privileged accounts
and exploiting them to gain access to sensitive resources.”
Kozlovsky is running JVP’s new Cyber Labs incubator,
launched last May in collaboration with Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev under the Office of the Israeli Chief Scientist.
As
the largest investor in Israeli cyber security, JVP had been fielding
dozens of requests for seed funding, and saw an opportunity to nurture
the next wave of cyber security and big data companies to emerge from
Israel.
“There
is a common recognition now that existing products for cyber security
are limited in scope,” Kozlovsky tells ISRAEL21c. “We see a paradigm
shift in security systems from reacting after an attack is identified to
proactive systems that can predict and prevent an attack.” GE already
has signed on as an investor in one of the incubator’s early startups.
Formerly
a captain in the military’s electronic warfare unit and co-founder of
PLYmedia and Altal Security, Kozlovsky co-founded the information
security and cyber security program at Tel Aviv University. The
Yale-educated lawyer and computer scientist notes that Israel has some
20 years of experience in cyber warfare.
At
the launch of JVP Cyber Labs, from left, partners Nimrod Kozlovsky and
Yoav Tzruya; JVP General Partner Gadi Tirosh; Dr. Rivka Carmi, president
of Ben-Gurion University; and Orna Berry, VP and general manager of the
EMC Center of Excellence in Israel.
“We
have the expertise to understand cyber-attack vectors. We have a strong
ecosystem of information security enterprises and a government willing
to test new tools,” he says. “It’s a good time for cyber investment in
Israel.”
Outsiders are insiders
There’s a good reason business is booming. Despite high-profile hack attacks, many systems aren’t properly protected.
Moscow-based
cyber security firm Kaspersky Labs — which established an Israeli
branch several months ago — discovered that only six percent of
companies surveyed around the world understand the daily threat of
malware attacks.
CyberArk
found in its most recent annual survey that 80 percent of nearly 1,000
global executives and IT security professionals believe cyber-attacks
pose a greater risk to their nation than physical attacks, and 51%
believe a cyber-attacker is currently in their corporate network or has
been in the past year.
Since
barely a day passes without news of the latest battle in the cyber
warfare front, new and established Israeli companies that deal with all
the different aspects of the problem are well positioned to sell
products.
When
Israeli President Shimon Peres visited JVP last June, the venture
capital firm chose CyberArk to represent the information security
sector. Chen Bitan, CyberArk’s general manager for Europe, Middle East
and Africa, gave Peres a locking book to symbolize the company’s
approach to information protection.
Heading
up CyberArk’s Boston-area corporate office, Mokady is often asked to
speak locally about the “Startup Nation” phenomenon.
“Though
we are no longer a startup, there is an Israeli agility and ‘never say
never’ approach that was critical from day one, but is a very important
element even today because we are facing a complex and ever-changing
problem,” he says. “Cyber warfare is no longer a hacker sitting in his
living room, but a sophisticated process financed by nation states.”
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