When Safety Detective asked Roy Zur—the founder and CEO of Cybint Cyber Solutions—what his company is doing to stop cybercrime, he told us how his company is education children and adults so they are ready to take on the threats themselves.
Safety Detective: How did you get started in the cybersecurity industry?
Roy Zur: I actually got started in the cybersecurity industry when I was in the Israeli military. I served in the cyber unit (8200) for about a decade in different cyber intelligence positions. After my service, I left the military but kept doing my yearly reserve service, which was screening and training candidates for Unit 8200. That gave me most of my background in the cybersecurity space.
SD: Why did you start Cybint?
RZ: Cybint is a cyber education company. We develop technological solutions, scenarios, simulations, and other platforms to allow people to acquire the necessary skills to work in cybersecurity. Some of them are students, others are employees, SOC teams, threat hunters; we have all levels of training. What made me decide to start the company was my experience in the military, seeing how efficient we can be in training people and getting them up to speed with the necessary skills in just a few months, versus years of experience needed and long training. I wanted to create something that is fast, efficient, but still accurate.
SD: Tell me about your cyber literacy program.
RZ: The cyber literacy program is designed for non-technological people. Cyber literacy is the necessary understanding of cyberspace, cybercrimes, issues of compliance and regulation, risk assessment and management, cloud security, endpoint security, and other issues, even if you are in a non-technological position like C-suite, executives, or compliance. This is something that we designed first for universities, but then we adapted it for the industry.
SD: What are some of your other programs?
RZ: We have more advanced programs in general for businesses. We provide what we call different levels of subscription. So instead of having access just the one program, they have access to the entire Cybint cyber training box. some of our more advanced programs focus on SOC (security operations center) management, SOC operation, and SOC analysis. They focus more on hands-on security monitoring, operating, and management. Others are more around a cyber threat intelligence, or threat hunting. It’s more about collecting data, analyzing data, and identifying threats before they happen.
Other programs focus on ethical hacking, like offensive cyber, but for ethical purposes. For example, testing apps or the infrastructure of the company to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And, of course, we have other even more advanced scenarios like malware analysis, reverse engineering, and forensics. But the idea in general is to create a platform so that an employee in organization will always have the most up to date scenarios.
SD: How does your company keep us safe in the cyber world?
RZ: Our vision—and it’s ambitious—is to actually create a safer world through education. Part of our mission to do that is not just sell solutions to companies and to universities and to organizations. We see ourselves first and foremost as educators coming from different aspects of cyber security and cyber intelligence. We do a lot of live events and webinars, workshops, and training that are free.
In addition, we have now started to launch a new product that we call Cyber K-12, which is going to be ready this upcoming fall. This is going to be a cyber training and education solution for students in middle schools and high schools. We are also in contact in several governments including some states in the United States and countries in Asia and Europe, to start providing cyber literacy and necessary skills from a young age. In our opinion, this is part of building a safer world, and we need to start as early as possible.
SD: That is really unique.
RZ: From a vision perspective, the most important thing is to start as young as possible and provide the tools and skills for these people to be relevant also for the future employment world.
SD: What do you feel is the worst type of cyber threat to the world?
RZ: When we think about the worst type of cyber threats, it’s really depends what frightens you the most. For the end-user, it’s probably still ransomware.
Having said that, there are more dangerous threats but may be less known. For example, APT (advanced persistent threats) that sit on your system but you’re unaware of them. They steal your data and they get access to your devices.
As a previous intelligence officer from the military, I think that if you get ransomware, at least you know that it happened and you can decide if you have a good backup or not and if you will pay the ransom. With different types of spyware and advanced persistent threats and others, you may not be aware of them for months, maybe years. And it is much more frightening to not know that you have someone spying on your devices.
SD: How do you see cyber security developing in the next five years?
RZ: A lot of things will move to automation. While the devices and the threats to them will become more sophisticated, the “war” between good and evil will just be on a larger scale. At the same time, we are seeing governments and other organizations and entities utilize cyber as a weapon like in cyber warfare.
In the next five years, not just cybercrime, but also cyber warfare, will be on the rise. Governments and terror organizations will use offensive cyber tools as a weapon to cause damage and chaos on a much larger scale.