Hi, everybody. I'm Ed Amoroso and for this week, we got a great guest. I've got my good friend, Lior Frenkel, who is the founder and CEO of Waterfall Security. Welcome to our discussion. Thank you, Ed. How're you doing? Great being here. So, you're in from Israel, that's your home. Yeah. Yeah, I'm from Israel and I'm here quite a lot. It's part of the business. That's great. Yeah. Now tell us, we have a lot of young people who were part of our course. How did you get interested in technology and computing and eventually the security? Well, I'm like a classic cliche. I got my first computer when I was eight. Well actually, I didn't even get it myself. My older brother got it for him and I don't. He wasn't caught up and one day I just sat in front of the computer and never left it until now. I taught myself how to program. Back then and especially in Israel, they didn't teach coding in school. We didn't have your own computer labs and everything so, I taught myself from books and trial-and-error. And, it was so exciting. I remember, I would go a full-nighters just writing and trying and writing and waking up and trying to stay awake at school cause I didn't sleep all night. And, I'm just like that from then. So it's, yeah. That's interesting. I think part of the enthusiasm is the amount of control you have. When you write code, especially low level code, assembly, when you write like really low level, the level of control you have if the outcome is amazing. It's something that you almost don't have in anywhere else. And I think, this is what caught my attention at the first time, being able to create something that will actually happen. It's not something you want to do, you're talking about doing, you think you can do. You actually do it and it actually works. So, once you get that feeling, you want it again and again and again. How did you get interested in cybersecurity? Trying to break things is something that either you like. There are people that like to operate things and work with things and there other people that like to break things and see how they are built, and I think I'm more on that side. So, from there to cybersecurity to hacking to all of those issues, it's like natural. It's addictive, right? It is. When you sort of learn to break into things. Yeah. I mean, the best way to learn something, break it. To break it, yeah. Yeah, no question. And so, first of all, really understanding how computer works, the low level, the internals and also trying to break things down to their smaller parts, these two things allows you to. Then, when you want to operate stuff, to operate it optimally. I love that so much myself. Very, very addictive. Now, tell us about your company, Waterfall Security. What do you guys do and what are some of the threat issues that you guys focus on? So, Waterfall Security Solutions was founded in 2007, headquartered in Israel, and we are selling worldwide. We have a fully armed subsidiary here in the states, based out of D.C. And like our mission, the reason that the company was founded was to be able to better secure industrial sites, networks that control physical processes, physical machinery, equipment from the outside world. Okay, the assumption is, there's always a real good need to allow data to be sent out. People need to know what's going on in those sites from remote. It's all good but you really don't want to connect a power plant turbine to the internet. You don't want to have the production sites of a pharmaceutical plant being accessible from the Internet. Right. But sometimes, there's no other options. So, solving that problem is what we're doing. We are technology company. We have quite a few really cutting edge technologies like the flagship technology that we have is called Unidirectional Security Gateway, and it's deployed today in hundreds of sites worldwide in critical sites like nuclear power plants and also platforms and also in water systems and regular manufacturing and so on, enabling connectivity, enabling integration between the industrial side and the business side and the internet, but in a way that secures the control networks. Unidirectional implies sort of a data diode capability. Is that the right way to think about it? Like information flowing in one direction? Yeah, we don't call our technology that because it oversimplifies what does technology does. So, if you want a better analogy, the company is called Waterfall because water in a waterfall can go only one direction. It makes sense. Yeah. And the technology is very similar to that in a way because it creates like a physical barrier between the outside world which is, let's call it downstream, and the internal world which is the control network, which is upstream. And water, through the waterfall, can only flow downstream from the control network from the power plant out to. And, there is a physical limitation. Water cannot climb up the waterfall. Makes sense. Now, how do you deal with the massive number of protocols, legacy, technologies that are all completely nonstandard? At least, as I understand it. It must be very difficult. Hundreds of work years of R&D and a lot of scientific work going in, learning those protocols, learning those systems, building the right interfaces, verifying them. In many cases, we work with the vendors of the products to make sure that everything is supported from both ends and this is what we do. This is a big part of what Waterfall does is make sure that we can connect to all of the existing systems and variations, often proprietary system. And, it's a headache but it's business. Let me ask you something I think our learning community would be interested in hearing. A lot of them are preparing for first jobs or dreaming of working for a cool cyber company. What do you guys look for when you're hiring and interviewing young people coming in? Yeah. Are there some things that you have in your mind that you think are really important for somebody to get into the kind of work that we do? Yeah. Well, of course it depends on the position. But in Waterfall, when we bring on people, we bring on people. We don't fill positions. We don't bring a person to do this job. So, we look more on the quality of the people making sure that they are of high integrity, that they have a drive to succeed, that they don't bail out when things become hard. And then, we see which current position is available and their experience fits or their desire fits, and we employ them. We have people working from Waterfall since inception. We have people working for water for like six years, seven years. These are large terms for start ups in this industry. I think it's better because people know that they are here, that they are valued and that we will, in the positive way, make that the most use of what they can over time. So, we have many people that's started as R&D in writing code and are now doing other things. We have people starting in marketing and now their doing BusDev and we have people started with QA and now they are high in the hierarchy on the operations and customer interfaces. I think it's a bit different from other companies and it's very different from how things are happening here in the U.S. Well, I hope you'll give extra credit to anybody who applies for a job who's taken this course. Okay? You let me know if you start getting some resumes. I will. Listen, on behalf of our whole community here, I want to thank you for traveling so far to visit. Sure, my pleasure. And share with our whole group and we wish you and your whole team luck. Excellent, thank you. Thanks for your time. Thank you.
