From video games to cyber defense: If you don’t think like a hacker, you won’t win
interview According to Remedio CEO Tal Kollender, the only way to beat the bad guys hacking into corporate networks is to “think like a hacker,” and because not everyone is a teenage hacker turned cybersecurity startup chief executive, she built an AI to do this.
“My thought was: if I have a hacker mindset, why not adapt it into defense,” Kollender told The Register. “Because if you don’t think like a hacker, you won’t be able to beat them, right?”
We sat down (virtually) with Kollender to discuss her former life hacking video games and how that led her to start Remedio (formerly Gytpol). The startup recently raised $65 million in its first-ever funding round on a $300 million valuation, and its clients include household names Colgate-Palmolive and Kraft Heinz.
“Curiosity is the name of the game,” she said. “I was always curious. What brought me to what I do now is solving some problems from a different angle.”
For example: one plus one equals two. “But in order to get to two, you don’t really need one plus one,” Kollender said. “There are other ways – two plus zero minus two plus four. There are various options to get to the results.”
Her first lesson in this came from an Israeli online game that Kollender describes as a cross between Tetris and Icy Tower. She had been ranked No. 1, and then overnight, an unknown player beat her. “I was pretty jealous and upset, and at the same time I said, ‘there’s no way someone can beat me because I’m the best.'”
The other player’s “impossible” score led her to figure out how to hack into the game’s database and write her own impossible score, before moving on to hacking Sony PlayStation games, chat apps, and phones.
Later, while serving in the Israeli Air Force and training to become a fighter pilot, the Israel Defense Forces reassigned her to the IT Corp Cyber Security-Systems Division.
On the defender side and in the private sector, Kollender previously worked as a system security architect at Dell EMC before starting her own company with co-founders Gilad Raz and Yakov Kogan in 2019.
“We wanted to change the way companies fix things, without any business disruption,” she said. To this end, Remedio uses AI to find and auto-remediate vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, weak controls, compliance gaps, and other security threats across corporate devices.
As criminals increasingly use AI to do these same things – scan for vulnerabilities, missing patches, and misconfigurations – it becomes a battle of AI versus AI, and a race between defenders and attackers.
Digital intruders used to break into networks and spend months snooping around, searching for credentials to allow lateral movement and steal valuable data. “Now, they do it in weeks or days. That’s how fast AI has made things,” Kollender said. “And if defenders don’t keep up the pace and grow” their own usage of the technology, “then the attackers might beat us.”
As several former teenage hackers found out in their formative years, Kollender refuses to get beat at her own game, whether that’s a video game or cyber defense. ®
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