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"Then we identified an Iranian attack." Executive Summary with Eyal Gruner - Walla! Of money

2022-05-04T15:13:53.451Z


He first heard the word "hacker" when he was 13 - and the rest is almost history. Eyal Gruner tells about the personal journey from someone who was a child prodigy, and became an entrepreneur and businessman


"Then we identified an Iranian attack."

Executive summary with Eyal Gruner

He first heard the word "hacker" when he was 13 - and the rest is almost history.

Eyal Gruner tells about the personal journey from someone who was a child prodigy, and became an entrepreneur and businessman who invested in quite a few leading companies in the cyber field

Liat Ron

03/05/2022

Tuesday, 03 May 2022, 12:44 Updated: Wednesday, 04 May 2022, 17:57

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Name

: Eyal Gruner, 34, founder and CEO of Saint.



Who I am

: A strong and purposeful technologist. If I want something I will do anything to get it and hope they tell me I think outside the box. The most important trait for a startupist is not to give up and see the positive.

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"Hope they tell me I think outside the box" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Roots

: A paternal grandfather, who was a cousin of Dov Gruner, was born in Hungary and went through the war there.

After he died, I discovered that he had testified at Yad Vashem.



He lost his whole family when he was a teenager, managed to escape with his brother and they hid in the woods and slept in the snow.

He said that when he came to some village and was very hungry, meat was distributed there.

He did not touch it and in retrospect it turned out to be human flesh.

When they arrived in Israel, he met my grandmother, who immigrated from Libya and came from a wealthy home.

When riots broke out there, her brother was murdered and the family had to pay a lot of money to be smuggled into the country.

They moved from place to place following Grandpa's work and eventually settled on the streets.



A grandmother on my mother's side came from a rooted Jerusalemite family, generations in the city, with roots from Yemen and Iraq.

Grandpa, who came from Cairo, worked in the post office.

Dad was an electrician and became an electrician.

I inherited all the logic and technical sense from him.



From my mother, who was a nurse at Shaare Zedek, I got the business sense.

When I was in elementary school she bought me a bag with yoyo and said, go sell in class.

She would give me the newspaper and ask what was better now, Euros or dollars, and I sat and calculated, she was also the one who taught me to bargain.

They recognized one of the kibbutzim and settled in Jerusalem, in the Givat Mordechai neighborhood.

"I inherited the business sense from my mother" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

My childhood

: I am the fourth in a religious family, a knitted cap, they were expecting a daughter and got a mess.

I attended a religious state elementary school and a high school in Himmelfarb.

I played football, practiced taekwondo and as a Sabbath-keeping child I would go on long walks.



At 13, two friends were talking about hackers and I asked what it was and started reading and getting interested.

We had a computer at home and I learned everything on my own.

In Himmelfarb there was a computer lesson with teacher Yossi Aaronson, where I learned a little programming and when it was discovered that computers at school had a worm, I was curious how it worked and helped him clean the computers.



As a kid I was in a hacking group, we would correspond, do things together - all sorts of things, without elaborating.

At the age of 14 and a half, I started working with journalist Ido Keinan.

I had a lot of knowledge and I helped him.

I remember he handed me a disk with the Trojan horse, and I was able to prove a connection to one of the suspects and it was released.

"I remember he handed me a CD with the Trojan horse, and I was able to prove a connection to one of the suspects" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Youth career

: At the age of 15 I went to a big bank branch to open a bank account.

I stopped at the ATM, started playing with it and managed to get into the bank's internal network.

I went to the deputy branch manager and told him they had a problem.

He did not understand what I was talking about and Ido Keinan wrote an article about it.



A month later I was at the bank again and saw that the ATM had been taken out.

There was a trading post with a keyboard, a pleasure for a hacker, just to break out, and again I found a problem.

I went to the deputy manager who recognized me and said he had read the article and now he knows what he needs to do, I was afraid something bad would happen but he told me he wanted my phone number.

When I was on my way to school the security manager of the whole bank called me and asked to meet with me.



We set up at an upscale restaurant in Jerusalem, three people were waiting for me there and they asked me to explain what I found out and what they should do, before we parted he threw me, come work with us on the big holiday.

The great freedom came, I waited and nothing.

I picked up the phone and asked what was going on.

After a day they came back to me with a job offer.

I continued to work even during my studies.

Twice a week a taxi from the bank near the high school would wait for me, take me to Lod and take me home in the evening.

Aladdin's token: "They gave me a very high offer" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Hacking

: In 2004 there was a big hacking conference in Tel Aviv.

There was a virtual competition where you had to break into a bank and steal money.

I got there without a computer.

The guys from the bank gave me one and said, go break it.

I succeeded and won first place.



Aladdin distributed an "token" there and when I downloaded something from their site I found a loophole and reported it to them.

They asked to meet, gave me a very high offer and I went to the bank and said I should leave.

They did not let me and in the end I found myself working four months in two jobs, the majority remotely and then I started my own company.



Bug Sack

: I founded it at the age of 16 and a half together with Idan Amir, who was 28 years old and could have registered it in his name.

He was in charge of the business and I was in charge of the technology.

As a cyber company, we would hack into our customers and explain how we did it and how to fix the breach.

Then I enlisted in the army, in a technological intelligence unit and Idan took the company to him until I was discharged.



: My partner.

She brought me the good, opened to me everything that is not work, she has life wisdom and a huge heart, the love of living comes from her.

She started in information security, moved to high-tech, was a coach and today she trades in the stock market.

We live in the center of Tel Aviv and we have three cats and four dogs, one of them 20 years old and one has three legs.

"We took over all of Europe without raising money at all" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Versailles

: After the liberation we changed direction and made an anti-fraud product.

We sold it to banks, insurance companies and credit card companies and took over all of Europe and all that without raising any money at all.

In 2013 we had an option to be acquired by a large company or get an investment and after five months we got a call from a representative of "F5", a huge cyber corporation that specializes in making the data center faster and safer, and he asked us to come to New York because he has an offer for us.

I flew with my investor.



At the meeting we received a relatively low offer and the investor got up from the table and said, this is irrelevant, I want a number with nine digits and came out.

Slowly we raised the price and in the end we got close to $ 100 million and I stayed to work for a year or so because it was important to me that our product would connect to theirs.



Exit

: I was then 24. I went through half a year of total atref, I lost it a bit and wasted a lot of money in a relatively short time.

In retrospect it was a good lesson I went through.

So I asked myself, what next?

There were a few things I thought about.



The first option was education for a short time I was a guide of young entrepreneurs who came from difficult populations and I liked to influence the youth.

The second option was to deal with security matters and the third - to set up something really big.

When we made the exit we were a relatively small company, 40 employees, $ 100 million, it did not feel enough to me.

I aspired to a company with hundreds of employees, with significant value, that would protect many customers.

Leisure: MDA courses, volunteering in the police and windsurfing (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Saint

: In 2015 I was at the largest conference in the world for information security and I realized that there are too many technologies and products.

An organization that wants to protect itself must buy lots of products and hire a lot of people to operate them and adapt them to work together.



I wanted to set up a platform that contains a variety of products, simple to operate, simple to operate, and works for the customer, when the intention was not to target the large organizations, which have the resources to take care of themselves, but rather the medium and small companies.



That same year, one of the government organizations in the country installed the system and we identified an Iranian attack.

We helped stop and locate the perpetrators.

We focus on the US and Europe, but we also have customers in Africa and Asia, through a European partner. The company is growing frantically.



Two years ago we were 50 employees and today we are 250, and we are looking for people who love challenges and technology, who know how to think outside the box, know how to work in a team and want to make an impact.

There are a lot of employees who are in a large organization and are not exploiting their potential.

We have offices in Rishon LeZion, for those who come from the south and Jerusalem and in Azrieli in Tel Aviv.

We work hybrid, two days from the office, two days from home and one day to choose.



Investments

: I find people who want to be entrepreneurs, help them with the initial money and connect investors to them, all in the cyber field.

I'm invested in "Simulate", which does simulations of cyber attacks, in "Sequod", which deals with the protection of the source code and the cloud, "Child Security", the "Elastic" branch in the country, "Bagsk" still works and two new companies, "Sink" and "Cyclops".



Time management

: There are about 600 employees in all the companies in which I am invested, and I am not active in them on a daily basis.

I'm on board, helping if needed and learning a lot from them.



leisure

: I used to eat a lot of meat and for health reasons I also stopped using milk and became vegan.

Salad I really do not like.

My leisure time is the companies I help, I volunteer with the police when needed, I did a few courses at MDA and saved twice a life, once an elderly woman who suffocated in a restaurant and made her a hemlock and the second time in a serious car accident Nadia and I were involved in. Besides, I started windsurfing.



Looking to the future

: I will focus on Saint in the coming years and with its help to help as many organizations as possible defend themselves.In the distant future I feel the need to do good in this world, from green energy to better education.

  • Of money

Tags

  • Hi-Tech

  • Cyber

  • Hacker

Source: walla

All business articles on 2022-05-04

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