Podcast Episode 105
Shrink what a breach can reach
with Yair Grindlinger · Surf AI
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Episode 105 of The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. Host Jon McLachlan, co-founder of YSecurity and Cyberbase.ai, talks with Yair Grindlinger, co-founder and chief executive of Surf AI, which runs security programs with a system of agents. Yair says that once an attacker is in, artificial intelligence makes reaching and exfiltrating valuable data far faster and easier than it has ever been, so reducing the blast radius now deserves as much effort as preventing the breach, if not more. They also cover internet security weather, what security analysts are happiest to hand to agents, and why he's an optimist about where defenders end up. Published October 6, 2026. About 29 minutes.
Episode notes
If your security budget goes almost entirely to keeping attackers out, Yair Grindlinger thinks you're underfunding the part that's becoming more and more urgent. The co-founder and chief executive of Surf AI says artificial intelligence changed what happens after someone gets in. For years it was hard to turn a crack into meaningful data exfiltration. Now, once an attacker is inside, getting to the valuable information and pulling it out is much, much easier than it used to be.
His answer is to split the spend. Do everything you can to reduce the risk of a breach, then put just as much, if not more, into limiting the blast radius. Jon's name for the threat is internet security weather, the storms of bots that used to spray known vulnerabilities at random and now come back intelligent, backed by capable agents.
Asked how long a system online has before a breach, Yair says he thinks it's already happening right now, in ways we don't know about. He's still an optimist. Once defenders have the better technology and cover their assets, he expects security to end up in a better place than it's ever been.
There's also a moment security leaders will recognize. Asked how security teams take to the agents, he gives the expected answer about strategic work, then corrects himself. What they mention first is getting rid of the chasing and the ticket follow-ups, the part of the job he calls burger flipping.
Surf AI launched in March 2026 with $57 million to run the whole security program with a system of agents, and it's hiring in Israel and the United States.
Hosted by Jon McLachlan — co-founder of YSecurity.
Watch the full interview
Topics in this episode
Key takeaways
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Shrink what a breach can reach.
Yair Grindlinger's order of work is to do everything you can to reduce the risk of a breach, and then to spend as much time as you can, equally if not more, on reducing the blast radius. The goal is that a small breach doesn't send the crown jewels out the door.
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Artificial intelligence changed the second half of an attack.
For many years, he says, the industry was lucky to have security by obscurity, because it was really hard to turn small breaches into meaningful data exfiltration or damage. Today, once attackers are in, artificial intelligence makes getting to the sensitive, valuable information and exfiltrating it far, far faster and easier than it has ever been.
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Expect a crack here and there.
With thousands and thousands of agents working together against you, chances are they'll find a crack here and there. Close every crack you can, which is part of what Surf AI does, and plan for the ones that will still be there.
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More may already be going on than anyone knows.
Asked how much time a system that's online has before a breach, he doesn't give a number. The level of exposure and activity he sees is so high that he's afraid to imagine what is already going on that we don't know about, and in his words, time is not an asset we have.
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Staying manual is a major risk already.
An organization that won't apply artificial intelligence to operationalize its exposure reduction and threat detection, and stays mostly with manual processes, is putting itself at major risk already, he says, and definitely in a year or two.
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Surf AI started with 40, 50, 60 security tools.
Asked what they needed most, chief information security officers kept describing 40, 50 or 60 security tools and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of assets, with no way to bring it all together into a real, secure environment. When artificial intelligence came along, the founders concluded that for the first time it could be done, and that it had to be.
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Analysts love losing the grind first.
He expected the emotional hook to be more time for strategic work. What analysts are excited about first is not having to do the work they never wanted, following up on people, escalating, and opening, updating and closing tickets, the day-to-day work he calls burger flipping.
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Attackers lead for a few years, then defenders pull ahead.
He calls himself an AI optimist who isn't blind to the risks. Attackers are moving faster than defenders for now, and once defenders apply the new technologies at scale and cover their assets, he expects cybersecurity to be in a better state than it has ever been, after a few scary years.
Pull quotes
“The second thing, that is as important, and more important than ever by far, is to eliminate or reduce as much as possible the blast radius.”
“We were very lucky to have security by obscurity for many years. It was really hard to translate a lot of those small breaches into meaningful data exfiltration or meaningful damage to the organization.”
“Today with AI, once they're in, then with AI, getting into the sensitive information, valuable information, and exfiltrating it, it's far, far faster and easier than it has ever been.”
“You need to do everything you can to reduce the risk for a breach, and then you have, equally if not more, to spend as much time as you can to reduce the blast radius.”
“If you're not going to move to AI to do that, and you'll stay with kind of manual processes mostly, and stuff like that, you're putting your organization in a major risk already, and definitely in a year or two.”
“The level of exposure we see and the level of activity is so high that I'm almost, I would say I'm afraid to imagine what is already going on that we don't know about.”
“Time is not an asset we have. We don't have time.”
“So it's a self-driving car of cybersecurity. It's crazy. It's amazing to see it. It's science fiction, and it's exciting.”
“A lot of what agents are very good at is following up on people, escalating, opening tickets, updating tickets, closing tickets, doing all the mundane day-to-day burger flipping.”
“The customer said it's like having an army of agents. This army of agents, it's like a huge team I could never have afforded to hire.”
“I'm an AI optimist. I'm not blind to the risks, but overall I think AI will increase the capacity of what humans can do in the world.”
“Security is a condition. It's an enabler. It's just like flying a plane. Without security, we couldn't fly in planes.”
About the guest
Yair Grindlinger, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Surf AI
Yair Grindlinger is co-founder and chief executive of Surf AI, which runs security programs with a system of agents that close exposures end to end and has offices in New York and Israel. Before Surf AI he co-founded FireLayers, which Proofpoint acquired in 2016, and later led cloud strategy at Proofpoint as a senior vice president. Surf AI was founded in 2024 by a team of Israeli cybersecurity veterans, most of whom, Yair says on the show, came from Proofpoint, and it launched in March 2026 with $57 million in funding led by Accel, with Cyberstarts and Boldstart Ventures. The company is hiring.
Surf AI ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Open roles at Surf AI ↗
About the host
Jon McLachlan is co-founder of YSecurity, the on-demand cybersecurity team for startups, and of Cyberbase.ai. The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley is hosted by Jon McLachlan and Sasha Sinkevich. Jon McLachlan on LinkedIn ↗
Context and sources
- Surf AI's launch announcement, datelined New York in March 2026, reports $57 million in funding led by Accel with existing investors Cyberstarts and Boldstart Ventures, names Yair Grindlinger as CEO and co-founder, and says the company was founded in 2024 by a team of Israeli cybersecurity veterans and was hiring engineers and security leaders in the United States and Israel. Source ↗
- SecurityWeek's report of March 17, 2026 describes Surf AI as based in New York and says the platform ingests signals from identity, security, cloud, data, human resources and information technology tools into a context graph of assets, owners, permissions and dependencies, with specialized AI agents driving execution while maintaining human oversight. Source ↗
- Surf AI's About page lists Yair Grindlinger as chief executive and describes specialized AI agents that close exposures end to end while keeping the customer's team in control at every step. Source ↗
- Proofpoint's announcement of October 20, 2016 names Yair Grindlinger as CEO and co-founder of FireLayers and puts the acquisition at approximately $55 million. Source ↗
- Surf AI's launch post describes him as a serial entrepreneur with over two decades in cybersecurity and the former SVP of Cloud Strategy at Proofpoint, and its launch interview with FinSMEs describes a team of more than 65 employees with offices in New York and Israel. Source ↗
- He says at 26:06 that Surf AI is hiring in go-to-market, engineering and research. The company's job board listed four engineering and data roles in Tel Aviv when this page was written (checked October 17, 2026). Source ↗
Transcript
Generated automatically from the episode audio and lightly edited for names, terms and readability, with the sponsor messages left out. Timestamps match the player above and the YouTube video. If a line matters to you, check it against the audio.
Read the full transcript 3,845 words
[Sponsor message from YSecurity]
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. I'm your host, Jon McLachlan, and we are joined today by an amazing guest, Yair Grindlinger, the co-founder and CEO of Surf AI. Welcome to the show.
Thank you, Jon. Thank you very much.
Would you like to share with all of our listeners what you've been up to over there at Surf AI?
Sure. So, we started Surf a couple of years ago. The team came from Proofpoint, mostly. We spent years there working with a lot of security teams and CISOs, and one of the questions I always ask CISOs is, what is the thing we can help you the most with? And more often than not, the answer was, look, I have 40, 50, 60 security tools. I have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of assets that I need to protect. How do I manage to bring it all together and actually turn it into a real secure environment? And when AI came along, we realized two things. A, maybe for the first time ever, it can be done. And two, it really needs to be done, because attackers with AI are a lot scarier than attackers without it. And I think in the last few months, and even in the last few weeks, what we've seen is that it's really more important than ever to automate, to leverage a system of agents to protect ourselves, versus trying to manually, with the tools of the past, protect against the threats of the future. So that's what Surf is all about. We're operationalizing the entire security program.
I'm curious, what inspired your entrepreneurial journey?
Oh, it started early. Inspiration, if you're looking for real inspiration, probably came from my grandfather, who had a restaurant, and he was an entrepreneur that way, many, many years ago. But I grew up hearing the stories, and so I always knew from a very young age that I'm going to be some sort of entrepreneur. [Cyber] was not really on the horizon, but entrepreneurship was. And so I got into it at a very early age, even in high school, and definitely, as I had the opportunity to take it in a little bit more professional way, I've done that.
I love it. It runs in the family.
Yeah. I think when you grow up on the... and by the way, I think that's true for a lot of people. The stories were not about why you should do it. The stories were about the hardship and the struggle. But when somebody speaks with enough passion about the hardship and the struggle, you want to also experience some of this hardship and struggle.
Of course. Like, misery loves company, or hardship. Hardship shapes us, doesn't it? It molds us. Like, if we're clay, hardship is the tools that build beautiful sculptures, right? So I'm curious, if you might be willing to share, what's been the most challenging moment on your journey so far with Surf AI?
I think with Surf, and I think in our day and age, the most challenging and interesting thing that we're all trying to figure out is this thing moves faster than anything we've ever experienced. Nothing in the past, in our lifetime, moved as fast as this thing moves right now. As entrepreneurs in cybersecurity that work with enterprises, trying to help them protect, it's very difficult to understand. It's almost easy to imagine maybe what's going to happen in five years. But who cares about five years? Right now, how do I protect myself, and what are the right priorities, and how do I think about it right now? Because the speed of the threat, like what we've seen with Hugging Face in the last few weeks, wasn't unimaginable. It was imaginable, but I don't think many of us imagined it as something that already happens right now. And I think that is the hardest thing, to figure out what is relevant already right now and you have to protect, versus what's going to happen in a year from now. I think that's the challenge.
It's almost like the future doesn't exist. The future has arrived.
Right. That's right. It's like a compressed reality, and how do you figure out... I read, somebody wrote a post recently, that we all understand that X years from now, when all the code in the world will be refactored and rewritten by some sort of future code-generating agents that will write flawless code with no vulnerabilities, then we'll be in great shape.
Sounds good. Sounds nice. [laughter]
Right. Right. And it'll be X years from now, and who knows. But what happens until then? And that is the thing, I think, as an industry, we all try to figure out, and help companies deal with.
Yeah. I mean, until then, the struggle is real.
Yeah. Struggle is very real.
So who's your ICP? Who do you typically close deals with? Who feels that pain point?
Yeah. Larger organizations. Because the larger the organization is... if you have hundreds of assets that you need to protect, maybe you can deal with an Excel sheet. But when you have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of assets, then you really need a team of agents to continuously... And you have thousands of employees in your organization. So we have companies with 80,000, 90,000 employees, with millions and millions of assets, and all the way down to, I think our smallest company had 3,000 employees and a few hundreds of thousands of assets. But that's the smaller part. And again, even at that scale, you have so many different tools to give you telemetry on so many potential exposures, and you find exposure on a minute-by-minute basis. You have exposure in a lot of different assets. You have misconfiguration and vulnerabilities and dormancy and all of those things, and they constantly happen. And you dedupe and group and prioritize, and understand the change process in the organizations, and communicate with people, and get approvals, and apply and test and update systems of record. And it's just something that, the larger the environment is, the more impossible it is to actually do it without using systems of agents.
I couldn't agree more. And I hear a lot of people say, especially in the security space, oh, I can't tolerate all of this new risk, we're going to pump the brakes on AI adoption. Well, you know what? It's just a tool, and you're going to be exposed to the new risks whether you adopt it or you don't adopt it, because it's out there and it is trying to break into systems and services. I used to use the term internet weather. There's internet security weather out there. You can have storms of bots that come through and scan and poke and try all of these different known vulnerabilities, and they're just spraying crap. It's totally aimless. But now you're going to get the same internet security weather, but it's going to be extremely intelligent. It's going to be backed by some of the best agents out there, and it's going to find whatever it is that is not perfectly patched. And so it changes things, right? And so I've almost heard of CISOs describe this new world that we live in as assume breach, right?
That's a very, very important thing, what you just said, because this is one of the concepts I'm trying to speak about with a lot of CISOs. Given that you're going to be targeted by thousands and thousands of agents working together, this army of agents, the chances that they won't find a crack here and there... I mean, you need to do everything, and that's part of what we do, try to find every way to close the cracks. But still, chances are, here and there, cracks will still be there. The second thing, that is as important, and more important than ever by far, is to eliminate or reduce as much as possible the blast radius. We were very lucky to have security by obscurity for many years. It was really hard to translate a lot of those small breaches into meaningful data exfiltration or meaningful damage to the organization. Today with AI, once they're in, then with AI, getting into the sensitive information, valuable information, and exfiltrating it, it's far, far faster and easier than it has ever been. So yes, you're absolutely correct. You need to do everything you can to reduce the risk for a breach, and then you have, equally if not more, to spend as much time as you can to reduce the blast radius. So if there is a small breach, not your entire crown jewels are going to run out the door.
That's right. I couldn't agree more. And it's almost a case of fighting fire with fire, because the problem that we face as an industry, as a security community, is so great. Meat brains have been writing software since the beginning of software, right? And now all of a sudden agentic machines are coming along. They're doing a much better job. It's pretty clear everything that's running at the moment needs to get leveled up, right? So everybody needs to up their game.
I mean, I think that an organization that won't apply AI to operationalize their exposure reduction and threat detection... If you're not going to move to AI to do that, and you'll stay with kind of manual processes mostly, and stuff like that, you're putting your organization in a major risk already, and definitely in a year or two.
For sure. Absolutely. I mean, how much time do you think a system that's online has until a breach?
Yeah. I mean, the level of exposure we see and the level of activity is so high that I'm almost, I would say I'm afraid to imagine what is already going on that we don't know about. And the speed of progress, with Chinese models and others... Yeah, it's now. It's just, do it as fast as you can, because time is not an asset we have. We don't have time.
No, it's not. [laughter] And now with everything moving like a hundred times faster, and at an increasing rate, too. That's the crazy piece, is that not only are things moving 100 times faster, but they're increasing in velocity.
That's right. That's right. And it somehow happens together with a lot of instability in the world, which kind of adds to the complexity of it all. So this combination of completely brand-new technology that is making it so much faster and so much easier to be super sophisticated, and a lot of instability in the world, all of that together really calls... I think it's now. Everybody needs to right now figure out how, as quickly as possible, to move into a new paradigm when it comes to defense.
For sure. Yeah, it's a new world out there. What's the proudest moment that you have on your journey so far with Surf AI?
The first time I've seen a system of agents actually... We had an idea, and this is the wonderful thing about what we do, and entrepreneurship and technology in general. When you have an idea and then you turn the idea into reality and it actually works, it's crazy. It's like magic. So we're sitting around and say, what if you have a system of agents that collect signals from multiple places, and they dedupe them and group them and prioritize them and understand the context, communicate with people and systems of record and this and that, and eventually apply the remediation? And then we built it, and then we deployed it, and the first time it actually worked and I saw this thing, and we're sitting in it as a team, and all the engineers and everybody saw it, it's almost like... I'm sure it's like seeing a self-driving car. A self-driving car, incredible.
Yeah. The first time I saw a self-driving car, I was like, oh my god, look at that.
So it's a self-driving car of cybersecurity. It's crazy. It's amazing to see it. It's science fiction, and it's exciting. So it also gives you a lot of hope, because while we are targeted, we're also in a position that we can defend ourselves better than we ever could. So there's going to be a transition period. I think attackers are moving faster than defenders, but once the defenders apply those new technologies at scale and cover the assets and operationalize it, I think we'll be in a better state than we've ever been with cybersecurity. But it will take a few years to get there, and it's a scary few years.
Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, I can imagine how a CISO of a large organization that sees this stuff working, sees the stuff happening with Surf AI, is just over the top excited, like crowd goes wild, because their bots are responsible for the security of those organizations, right? Tell me more about how this technology is being received by the security analysts, by the security engineers. Does it free up their time to do more interesting things, things that they've always wanted to do? Maybe get back to the reasons why they went into security in the first place.
So yes. And when we started, I thought that's going to be the emotional hook, that you get a lot more time to do the thing you always wanted to do, high-level, more strategic work. But what I discovered is the first thing they're excited about is the fact that they don't have to deal with the crap they never wanted to anyways. It's the parts of their jobs they never liked.
Gritty garbage.
Yeah. So a lot of what agents are very good at is following up on people, escalating, opening tickets, updating tickets, closing tickets, doing all the mundane day-to-day burger flipping, chair swirling jobs that no one wants to do. And before they're happy about the new things they can get to, they're super happy about these things they can get out of and they don't have to do anymore, because agents can do that for them. So I think there's kind of a double whammy here. You get rid of the things that you never wanted to do anyways, and then you get to do those things that you actually wanted to do and you never got to. So I think it's a great combination of emotional, positive emotional excitement.
Not to mention you get to sleep better at night.
Definitely. I think every... I don't know if sleep better at night is really a complete option for anyone in cybersecurity these days. [laughter]
But it's true. Yeah, it's true.
But recently, a week ago, we had a QBR with one of our customers, and the customer said it's like having an army of agents. This army of agents, it's like a huge team I could never have afforded to hire. So I think it gives a sense of empowerment to the leaders, because now you have a lot more resources, and it helps the people in the trenches that actually do the work focus on the important things and get rid of the bad things. So it's kind of a win-win in that way, and people react very well to it.
No, that's beautiful. I love being part of the change that you want to see in the world, and in the security space. I think you really got it. It's just perfect, right? Right thing, right time. It's so incredibly important and needed, and it's just a race against the clock at this point.
So, racing against the clock. And I think AI... I'm an AI optimist. I'm not blind to the risks, but overall I think AI will increase the capacity of what humans can do in the world. But security is a condition. It's an enabler. It's just like flying a plane. Without security, we couldn't fly in planes. But once we applied all the security, we can fly in planes, we can do so much. Same for cars. I think AI is the same way, just 10 times, across every industry. Our job as a security industry is to build everything that needs to be built in order to make sure we can fly those planes safely, across the board. It's very exciting, because it's truly business enablement in every sense of the word.
I'm super curious, if you could go back in time to meet your younger self, would you take that opportunity, and would you have any advice for your younger self?
You know, it's an interesting question. I'd take the opportunity. If you're given the opportunity, I'll take it.
You take it. Okay. Yeah. And then the question is, what would you tell your younger self?
Yeah. I think, I heard Elon Musk say at one of those interviews, be less patient. So I don't know that I was that patient, but if I go back in time, the thing I tell myself is be even less patient.
Be less patient. I love it. Less patient.
You know, whatever you think you can do in a year, why can't you do it in a month, or maybe two? If you can do it in a week, why can't you do it in a day? And if you can do it next week, why can't you do it today? So I think that's the attitude of accelerating, and what Elon Musk demonstrated can be done. I think that's something that is very inspiring, and I would give this advice to myself as a younger person, and to any young person, or not young person, anywhere. I mean, just don't be patient.
It's good advice. I mean, no one really knows when the clock is going to run out on our biological machines here, right? So show up, do something amazing.
Make it count, and do it quickly, because the faster you move, the more you get to do.
That is so true. Yeah. Absolutely. Spectacular. So you look up to Elon Musk. You take a lot of advice?
Yeah. I think he demonstrates to all of us what phenomenal entrepreneurship can build. I mean, I don't need to list it, everybody knows. But when you look at everything he built, phenomenal execution, phenomenal entrepreneurship, phenomenal engineering, you can see what can be done. And the properties and those qualities, and that drive to always push the limits. Time, that's a huge, huge factor. When someone says no, you can't do it, or it's going to take so long to do something, don't accept it. I think that's one thing, definitely. Move fast and execute tremendously. And the other thing is take on meaningful tasks with a tremendous impact, even if they're very hard, and often they are. There are a lot of incremental things that are also positive. I mean, they're good. But there was a period in time, I think now less, but there was a period in time where a lot of entrepreneurship went towards areas with less impact. And I think now we're back in a time where a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation goes to areas with a lot of impact. That also feels good.
That does feel good. That feels amazing. I could really see that future that Elon Musk describes, where AI will really become the most intelligent being around. Do you see that as well?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think in a lot of ways it's already here, and in some ways it's not yet here, but it's definitely going to come. And I think as an industry, cybersecurity, again, as I said before, our job is to figure out how we navigate it and build infrastructure that allows enterprises and individuals to stay safe in an environment like that, and take full advantage of those opportunities. And again, you can't stop it. It's going to happen. So let's put ourselves in an advantageous situation, where it happens and we are benefiting from it, versus being the victim of it.
Exactly. Refuse to be the victim. Yeah. Position ourselves where we can all make ourselves better. We can make the world better than the way that we found it.
Yeah. Absolutely. And security is a critical aspect of that.
Yeah. Definitely. It's one of those requirements that's needed for adoption of new things and new technologies. We need to be able to put ourselves in a position where we can come into this new world confidently. And so, all the gratitude in the world. I have so much gratitude for you and your team, sitting down, thinking through these hard problems, helping us as a security community navigate this stuff together. If anyone out there has heard this show and is super curious, would you like to have any shameless plugs? Are you hiring? If someone wants to do a demo, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
So first of all, yes and yes and yes. We are hiring top talent in go-to-market, in engineering, in research, of course. And for security people, leaders that want to know more, we're super excited. You can email me at Surf AI, or contact us in any other channel, and we would love to communicate and share more, get to know you, and talk about how to build this vision of a secure enterprise together.
Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah, there's a lot of CISOs out there that listen to the show, so don't be too surprised if one or two of them comes knocking on your door.
Love to. Love to speak with everybody.
Well, thank you so much for joining The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. I'm your host again, Jon McLachlan. Yair, again, thank you, all of the gratitude in the world, not just for joining the show, but for tackling this incredibly difficult problem. We're building the future that we all deserve, that we need. That's not going to come easy. A lot of work being thrown behind this, a lot of blood, sweat and tears. So receive all of the gratitude in the world. Thank you.
Thank you, Jon. Thank you very much for having me.
And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in to this episode. If you found this interesting, insightful, intriguing, please feel welcome to rate the show, leave a comment, post on your favorite social media platform. Any love at all that you feel is warranted would be received with all of the humility and gratitude. It's how we keep the show alive. And please stay tuned for the next episode as well. This has been a YSecurity production. Huge thank you, everyone.
[Sponsor message from YSecurity]
FAQ
Questions this episode answers
- How should a security budget split between preventing breaches and limiting the damage?
- Yair Grindlinger, co-founder and chief executive of Surf AI, frames it as effort rather than a dollar split. Do everything you can to reduce the risk of a breach, then spend as much time as you can, equally if not more, on reducing the blast radius, so a small breach doesn't send the crown jewels out the door. His reasoning is that thousands and thousands of agents working together will find a crack here and there.
- How did artificial intelligence change what happens after an attacker gets in?
- For many years, Grindlinger says, the industry was very lucky to have security by obscurity, because it was really hard to turn small breaches into meaningful data exfiltration or meaningful damage. Today, once attackers are in, artificial intelligence makes getting into the sensitive, valuable information and exfiltrating it far, far faster and easier than it has ever been.
- How long does a system that's online have before a breach?
- Grindlinger didn't give a number when Jon McLachlan asked. The level of exposure and activity Surf AI sees is so high, he says, that he's afraid to imagine what is already going on that we don't know about. His advice is to move as fast as you can, because time is not an asset defenders have.
- What's internet security weather?
- It's Jon McLachlan's name for the constant background of automated attacks, storms of bots that come through and scan, poke and try known vulnerabilities, aimlessly. His point on the episode is that the same weather is now extremely intelligent, backed by some of the best agents out there, and it finds whatever isn't perfectly patched.
- What problem is Surf AI built to solve?
- Grindlinger says that when he asked chief information security officers what his team could help them with most, the answer was usually 40, 50 or 60 security tools and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of assets, with no way to bring it all together into a real, secure environment. Surf AI operationalizes the security program with a system of agents that collects signals from many places, dedupes, groups and prioritizes them, works with people and systems of record, and applies the remediation.
- How do security analysts react when agents take over part of the job?
- Grindlinger expected the emotional hook to be more time for high-level, strategic work. What he found is that the first thing analysts are excited about is not having to do the work they never wanted, following up on people, escalating, and opening, updating and closing tickets, the day-to-day work he calls burger flipping. A customer told him it's like having an army of agents, a huge team they could never have afforded to hire.
- What did Yair Grindlinger say when Jon suggested agents mean better sleep?
- When Jon McLachlan added that all this automation means you get to sleep better at night, Grindlinger said he doesn't know if sleeping better at night is really an option for anyone in cybersecurity these days. He said it right after describing how analysts hand the grind to agents.
- Why is Yair Grindlinger an optimist about defenders?
- He calls himself an AI optimist who isn't blind to the risks. Attackers are moving faster than defenders for now, he says, but once defenders apply the new technologies at scale, cover their assets and operationalize it, cybersecurity will be in a better state than it has ever been. He expects that to take a few years, and calls them scary ones.
- What would Yair Grindlinger tell his younger self?
- To be even less patient. Whatever you think you can do in a year, he asks, why can't you do it in a month, and if you can do it next week, why can't you do it today? He also says to take on meaningful tasks with tremendous impact, even when they're very hard.