Go Hack Yourself
A new AI-powered testing platform aims to deliver cybersecurity peace of mind to the masses
Photo: EzoTech’s Xristos Silaidis and Mike Picard
WHETHER IT’S THE current state of public health that’s prompting a mass migration to digital, or a desire for more visibility and efficiency, businesses are moving their assets and operations online.
Unfortunately, for all the positives of pushing further into the digital space, there are the legitimate concerns about security of our information and our systems. The recent uptick in cybercriminal activity and the past year of data breaches suggests that most organizations are far from prepared for the risks ahead.
Mike Picard, founder and chief technology officer at EzoTech, was a former high-end penetration tester, tasked with finding new and inventive ways to exploit companies’ online assets in order to provide reports and solutions to strengthen them. In doing this work, he quickly realized that his workload seemingly had no end.
Based on the growth of the cybersecurity industry, Picard reasoned there had to be a more efficient — yet equally effective — way to deliver these services, and so he committed himself to automating his role.
“EzoTech is eliminating the need for in-house staff or contractors and effectively provides the largest bench of pentesters in the world” —Xristos Silaidis
EzoTech’s breakthrough software, Tanuki, is an AI-powered pentesting (penetration testing) platform that allows businesses to “hack themselves” for a fraction of the time and cost of employing an agency to conduct this work.
“Criminal enterprises are playing the numbers game,” says Picard. “Machine learning can take over and determine when it’s applicable to conduct the attack.”
“We are disrupting the non-scalable manual pentesting market with Tanuki — the world’s first true AI-driven pentesting as a service,” adds EzoTech president and CEO, Xristos Silaidis. “Tanuki autonomously acts as an advanced persistent threat and is fully scalable to thousands of pentests simultaneously. With Tanuki, EzoTech is eliminating the need for in-house staff or contractors and effectively provides the largest bench of pentesters in the world.”
Hackers must be creative and have mastery over various verticals of cybersecurity. That’s why talented hackers often have excellent incentives in front of them to help them get the job done.
“The current state of the landscape is one of fear and disparity,” says Silaidis. “The adversaries in the market have the advantage. They have resources, money and time on their side. They are well-funded and their technology is top shelf. Additionally, as they are utilizing machine learning as well as artificial intelligence to attack, if you don’t utilize the same strategy you will be compromised.”
According to Silaidis, what machine learning and AI has enabled is a significantly lower-cost pentesting solution so that mid-market companies can afford to protect their digital assets. Normally, cost would be too much of a barrier to gain access to this kind of service on-demand.
“Because of the way we’ve built the platform, we can conduct thousands of pentests, whereas companies would have to employ people to do them manually,” explains Silaidis, adding that the EzoTech team consistently embeds new cybersecurity exploits into the software.
“EzoTech is unique because we not only conduct a full, true pentest, including reconnaissance, vulnerability scanning, exploitation and remediation as well as reporting, we also attack our clients just like a bad guy or an advanced persistent threat would. We attack from hundreds of directions at once.” 