Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV.

Shira Rubinoff: And we are back at AWS re:Invent 2023. My name is Shira Rubinoff. I’m the Chief Cyber Security officer for Techstrong, and we’re streaming live this whole week over here in Las, Vegas.

I’m here with Rafi Sabel, the CEO of CySight. Rafi, such a pleasure to be speaking with you again.

Rafi Sabel: Hi, Shira. Thank you very much and it’s absolute pleasure to always talk to you. Thank you.

Shira Rubinoff: Thank you, Rafi. So Rafi, I’d love you to introduce yourself to the audience, tell them a little bit about who you are, your background, and then we’ll jump right into CySight.

Rafi Sabel: Sure. Rafi Sabel, I’m the CEO and founder of CySight, and I’ve been working with customers of all shapes and sizes for many years in network monitoring and cybersecurity and visibility of networks really, some very large companies, some of the largest on the planet. We’ve helped government customers and universities and campuses and financials to help them gain visibility. So that’s what I’ve been doing over the last few years.

Shira Rubinoff: So wonderful. And I’m very excited about your company. You’re really in a wonderful space.

And let’s jump right in. Why don’t you introduce everybody to CySight, who is CySight, and tell us your story.

Rafi Sabel: Sure. So look, as I say, we’ve been around in the space for a long time, understanding the issues that customers are having with visibility. And CySight was ultimately born out of the recognition that the traditional approach to cybersecurity, which often relies on fragmented and isolated tools, is just no longer sufficient to protect the valuable digital assets, especially in the face of the ever-evolving threat landscape.

So there’s several drivers that led us to the development of CySight. In particular, we saw how the lack of visibility coupled, especially now with the sudden and exponential use of encryption within networks, presents an entirely new challenge to customers.

And we’ve entered the age of encryption. This is a time that we’ve hit a period where data in motion, 98% of data in motion is encrypted. So that means that traditional tools are not able to see what’s going on under the veil of encryption. They’re collecting minuscule amounts of data out of those networks.

And we see companies unprepared to deal with these risks, thinking that they have the visibility that they need to manage risk, but they’re in danger because a lot of issues and malware is really sneaking undercover at the moment.

Shira Rubinoff: So what does CySight do? What do you come in and do for your clients and your customers?

Rafi Sabel: Well, CySight is unique in that it collects data out of the network and it scrutinizes all the interactions between the servers, between the clouds, the data centers, the users, the applications and evaluates all the risk of each of these different aspects, whether it’s country risk or site risk, dark web risk. And we’re bringing all of this information in. We’re using machine learning and baselining, and we have a level of retention within our solution that provides over 20 times more visibility than most tools combined. And that means that we can use that AR detection to overcome decryption limitations. We can provide a level of visibility of identifying what’s going on below the surface of the traffic.

And essentially, we are providing an integrated solution that is a comprehensive tool that covers both the networks, the endpoints, and it’s essentially a managed detection and response suite in a box. So we’re covering and integrating network detection response, endpoint detection response with deep forensics. And we’re using AI to pull out the needles from the haystack to show what changes are occurring within the environment and the servers and the data at risk, whether it’s reconnaissance that we’re identifying or infiltration or exfiltration and data going across VPNs and Tor networks and BitTorrent and we’re triaging that information together. So we really are providing a very unique, highly revolutionary cybersecurity solution.

Shira Rubinoff: Oh, very interesting. And let’s dial it down for our audience in terms of cybersecurity marketplace is very crowded space. How are you different from your competitors out there? What is your secret sauce? What is something that people say, “You know what, CySight is the way to go?”

Rafi Sabel: Well, firstly, it all starts with data because if you don’t have access to big data and a large learning environment for machine learning to take place, then you’re going to miss a lot of the patterns that we can elicit out of the data. And other tools in our space are collecting around 1 to 5% of the top of the data, whereas CySight at its base layer is collecting and absorbing and retaining and using a large amount of the metadata that is running through the network. So we really have a huge resource at our base that nobody else has.

And then we use that resource to learn about the environment, to baseline the environment and to detect change within the environment, right down to the server level, the user level, or on a larger level, microsegmenting the network so that we can provide levels of trust within the communication of what’s impacting what part of the network and what the cost and impact is going to be to the business at the end of the day.

Shira Rubinoff: Well, certainly trust is a key factor when it comes to all of this. So who would be your ideal customer? A lot of people are watching these interviews and they’re trying to learn about all these new companies and these great companies that are taking the top headlines over here. Who would be the ideal customer for CySight?

Rafi Sabel: Well, look, any customer that has data centers has data centers that assets that they want to protect, has difficulty with visibility in seeing what’s going across their network, these are the kinds of customers.

And that really then splits into the different verticals, whether it’s financial institutions or healthcare or ISPs and MSPs, who are also tasked with the cybersecurity of their customers, government organizations or government bodies, who have a high degree of compliance.

And some of these can be smaller bodies and some of them can be incredibly large, and each one has a different value orientation proposition. If you look at the banking, I think the stat was more than 60% of global financial institutions with at least $5 billion in assets were hit by a variety of cyberattacks in 2022. So that’s the financial sector alone. You look at government organizations, there’s leakages, there’s healthcare, there’s data leakages of social security services, smart cities.

The more we go into data and the more we go into giving our data to organizations, the chances of that data being made public becomes that much higher. And we’re trying to really protect our customers, provide them a level of visibility that is unprecedented, help them to see both the real-time issues as well as the backtrackability of those issues because sometimes you only discovered things well after the fact.

Shira Rubinoff: Very true.

Rafi Sabel: The Sunburst virus was a case in point, which is still rattling through the government in various governments around the world and large organizations. And that was a very difficult issue to deal with because here we had only after the fact the IP addresses published of those particular Sunburst attackers, and now we had to wade back through the history of the data to try and find what was impacted and which services and service were party or conversing with that malware.

Shira Rubinoff: Oh, that’s horrific. Yeah.

Rafi Sabel: So backtrackability or real-time functions that both have a case and we provide access to both.

Shira Rubinoff: Certainly. And I know that CySight has been growing and coming out with all new announcements. And is there anything new you want to share in terms of the later scope that’s been coming out of CySight with our audience?

Rafi Sabel: Well, we’re continually innovating. I mean we’re really pushed-

Shira Rubinoff: That’s always important. Yeah.

Rafi Sabel: We’ve really pushed the boundaries and we’re providing our customers a level of visibility. We’re a highly revolutionary product in an industry that has solutions that are really only dealing with a slice of what we do as a whole.

So we are addressing the industry challenges, we’re addressing organizational challenges. We’re addressing the individual challenges of the CSO within the organization. And as part of a defense-in-depth strategy, we’re helping to bring out layers of visibility that aren’t available in the marketplace besides CySight today. So that should provide customers with a huge peace of mind that there is a tool that is going to give them that level of visibility to detect and to track.

Shira Rubinoff: That’s excellent. And I always ask my interviewees, is there any specific tips, any cyber tips you want to leave our audience with? Everybody’s a wealth of information. I know you certainly been in the industry for a long time, have many successes and have great insight in the cyberworld itself. And it could be about CySight, it could be about anything specific that makes you feel passionate about the cybersecurity world.

Rafi Sabel: Well, I think the thing that I really would like to tell customers is that you need to appreciate that there’s been a really unprecedented change, and we’re at an inflection point in our marketplace in cybersecurity, in particular because of encryption.

So encryption is a wonderful thing. It protects data in motion. And it sounds like a great thing because it’s a secret code that keeps the digital messages and sensitive information safe from prying eyes. But at the same time, encryption, the wave of encryption as it’s flooded into to the marketplace today is really causing many of our traditional tools to become obsolete. And a new tool is needed to provide the visibility of what’s going on under the surface of encryption and the veil of encryption, because that’s really, as we are dealing with advanced threats, malware that is now sneaking under the veil of encryption into networks and, literally, moving around.

So it’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing, and it’s something that we should be facing straight on. And so many customers and so many engineers in the marketplace today are still thinking they’re okay. But they’re dealing with only 1 to 2% visibility and it’s a wonder or they wonder why they’re being hacked because you can’t control what you can’t see.

Shira Rubinoff: Very, very true. Well, Rafi, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for sharing your valuable insight with our audience. I know here at AWS and the world around, the cyberworld, they’ve all really enjoyed this conversation. And I encourage everybody to take a look at CySight and I look forward to speaking with you again soon, Rafi.

Rafi Sabel: Thanks so much, Shira.

Shira Rubinoff: Thank you.

Rafi Sabel: Absolute pleasure.

Shira Rubinoff: And we’ll be back with Techstrong shortly. Thank you.