[SaaS & Israel Business Series] Cybersecurity Threats: Detecting and Mitigating Risks With Ran Geva

Ran Geva is the CEO of Webz.io, a leading global provider of structured web data feeds for enterprises, developers, and analysts. It transforms the vast pool of web data from across the open and dark web into structured web data feeds, ready for machines to consume. With over 20 years of experience in software development and leadership, Ran is a serial entrepreneur and an expert in web data. Before founding Webz.io, he was the Founder of Omgili, a search engine for online discussions, and Co-founder of Buzzilla, one of the top web monitoring and analysis companies in Israel. Ran is also a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, where he connects with other successful entrepreneurs and learns from their experiences.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:53] Ran Geva introduces Webz.io and how it helps people
• [06:29] What are some Webz.io use cases?
• [09:32] Ran talks about monitoring the dark web for cybersecurity threats
• [15:56] Webz.io ideal customer profile
• [18:09] Dark web jargon people need to monitor
• [21:27] Webz.io pricing model
• [24:29] The Hamas’ surprise attack in Israel and how it went under the radar
• [34:43] Ran shares tips for combating misinformation
• [42:01] The impacts of war on people and business

In this episode…

In today’s digital age, cybersecurity is more important than ever. With ever-increasing cyber threats and attacks, how can your company proactively take measures to protect its sensitive data and information?

According to Ran Geva, cybersecurity is critical in any company’s operations. Hiring a cybersecurity expert can help you stay ahead of the game and ensure your company’s data is safe and secure. With their expertise, they can help you monitor the dark web, detect risks, investigate threats, and provide actionable insights that can help you make informed decisions about your company’s security.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Ran Geva, CEO of Webz.io, to discuss how to navigate web data. Ran talks about Webz.io and how it helps people, how to monitor the dark web for cybersecurity threats, dark web jargon, and Webz.io’s pricing model.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ran Geva on LinkedIn
• Webz.io

Special Mention(s):

• Guy Mor on LinkedIn
• Matthew Connor on LinkedIn
• CyberLynx
• The Cyber Business Podcast
• Ella Travels on Twitter

Related episode(s):

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[One Question] Dealing With Grief While Running A Startup with Wade Foster of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments: 

• “It’s not as easy to find the needle in the haystack in the dark web.”
• “Not anyone can have access to the dark web.”

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weiss here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different I’ve Ran Geva of webs.io. It’s webz.io. And Ran, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast, since this is part of the top Israel business leader series and also the SaaS series. So both of them a couple ones that check out, Ran is a member of Entrepreneurs’ Organization. I did one with I don’t know if you know, Orit Oz of EO Israel, she runs an agency for 25 years in the b2b space, she helps companies with their global expansion, and have consistent branding and messaging all over the world. And she talked about in the interview, despite the war, her and her team had to forge ahead and how they did that. And I had EO Israel member, also Amit Oestreicher of Xtras and G-nie. He talks about how he lost all his clients. I don’t know if he’s told you this Ran, but lost all his clients overnight, not once, but twice and how he bounced back. And on the south side, Wade Foster, one of the founders of Zapier, he talks about the journey starting it and some of the ups and downs. And I had one of the co-founders of Pipedrive, Urmas. Urmas talked about having brain surgery, getting married, moving to Estonia, from Estonia to the us all in the same year. When I talked to him Ran they had 10,000 paying customers when I interviewed him in 2013 now they I think have over 100,000 And it may he rest in peace he actually passed away because of the brain cancer. So that episode is near and dear to my heart as well. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships and in how do we do that we actually do that by helping you run your podcast, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. And Ran we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host in the company. So they could just develop amazing relationships and create great content. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire, share with the world what they’re working on. And so if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, go to rise25.com. To learn more. I have a lot of free episodes on Inspired Insider that basically answer almost any question you could ask about podcasting. So check that out. But I am excited to introduce Ran Geva. He’s a serial entrepreneur, web data expert. He’s a CEO and co-founder of Webz.io. They went through some name changes, you have some funny videos out there run about the old name, so I like the new name. The rebrand Webz.io. What’s that?

Ran Geva  3:24 

You see the webhook grew?

Jeremy Weisz  3:25 

I saw that on? Yeah, exactly. I think it used to be called the web hose. And then there was a spoof video that you talking about, it’s hard to come up with a name and you came up with a webhook. And then you’re like, no in the video. That’s not it. But Webz.io is great. It’s a leading global provider of structured web data feeds for enterprises, developers, analysts, and he’ll break down what that means and how it’s applicable. And I’m excited to talk about their lunar product which scours the dark web and some other places to alert you of what’s going on of places you may not be looking in probably aren’t looking so. But Webz.io transforms a vast pool of web data from across the open and dark web into these structured web data feeds, ready for machines and for you to actually consume and make sense of it. He has over 20 years of experience in software development and leadership, previously founded Omgili a search engine for online discussions and co-founder of Buzzilla, one of the top web monitoring and analysis companies in Israel, also, as I mentioned, an Entrepreneurs’ Organization member. So, Ran, thanks for joining me.

Ran Geva  4:40 

Oh, that sounds impressive. And I didn’t think of myself as two entrepreneur. But thank you.

Jeremy Weisz  4:46 

You’re a humble guy. Tell people about Webz.io in what you do, I tried to explain it.

Ran Geva  4:53 

It didn’t make the job. Basically what we do so when we did the read Reading we asked our clients, what do you think who what is, then web hose is for you. And they said, it’s kind of Google for machines. So when you go to Google to search information for humans, you get the first page and results and you’re happy with it. Machines that need big web data can produce Google and they want to, they needed the information in a different way formatted JSON or XML. They need vast amount of data not only the first page order not biased in order to analyze and to get insights or informed decisions. So Webz is a neighbor is taking the enormous amount of information online information and transform it or translate or format it into unified unstructured format data feeds that big data applications can then consume and analyze. Recently, we kind of changed or enhanced our vision, and are not only for machines, but also for humans, that we will talk about lunar. So also making this data available for humans to make informed decisions and analyze the data itself.

Jeremy Weisz  6:24 

Let’s talk about some use cases.

Ran Geva  6:29 

So when we initially started, we thought about the brand monitoring, you mentioned, I ran a brand monitoring company is really brain monitoring company. And we needed a lot of information and we had our own chronic technology, that kind of the basic technology that we have is based on. But when you really need to compete with Google, you need a way to access a vast amount of information if you want to get a global view of the world. And so companies come to us, they don’t want to deal with the collection part. That’s all we do. We do the collection, we do the formatting and the unification and a lot of work behind the scenes. And that just tap into CG repository and then they can get information they want. So brand monitoring, you want to see what people are thinking about you how your customers are experienced your products and services. What is the competition is doing when you do a press release, how it is the proceeds are people talking about etcetera, etcetera, being mainly used by marketing departments, probably department that really want to listen to what people are saying about them or their competitors. So that’s kind of a major just because we started from and other than monitoring, there’s a lot of other use cases could be our financial and financial goals from the basic of just monitoring financial information for our analysts. But also quant hedge funds that take huge amount of information and try to find relationship or correlation between commodity movement and what’s going on online. So they pulled on the huge machine that basically tried to find signals and relationship or correlation between movements and what happened before and then they can predict the future. So that’s another use case. Risk management, supply chain risk. For example, companies would love to know if there’s something that is risking or their brand, if it’s a fire, a war, some disaster that happened to your dairy suppliers or their suppliers, suppliers. And they need to go and monitor sometimes through their regulation changes that they want to must monitor in order to make sure that everything they won’t be surprised. And that’s kind of a main use cases for the open way. But we also have the dark web, which many people find interesting.

Jeremy Weisz  9:07 

Yeah, we’ll talk about the dark web. I just want to stick on open so brand protection. I don’t know if you hear on the flip side, what they did with the data. You ever hear those stories of, because people are just coming in, they’re like, okay, they’re using it, and they may be tracking their name or certain things. Do you ever hear from the companies like, oh, we took your data and this is how we, we used it?

Ran Geva  9:32 

Yeah, yeah, we do. So I think the most obvious one is credentials. We hear so many times that PII private information is being leaked online. And then people can get into accounts and get into the company and break into the company itself. So monitoring credentials could be password emails, but also credit cards social security numbers is very, extremely important. It’s very straightforward use case, like I want to monitor my social security number or credit card or email, or domain that is being leaked. So one of them my employee information got leaked. So that’s got a very, very, very straightforward analytical or monitoring alerting service that companies are using. But the more sophisticated ones, companies are monitoring their IP in the sense that IP address their IP, if there are risks, or in the sense that hackers found some kind of vulnerability. And they mentioned, either assets that they run, and they know that they’re being exposed out there. And there are hackers that are selling this information. So they found kind of certificate, they found a backdoor. And they can say, oh, we got this intel, or this x x, whatever company server access vulnerability, zero day, whatever. And if it does anyone want to buy and to the highest bidder, and then they can know and make sure so instead of more proactive approach to so, cybersecurity is kind of reacting. So you have a firewall, you want to see this attack, you’ve got to mitigate, dark, wherever the risk protection is rocky is before the attack happens, you go outside, and you see if there’s something that relates to you. We had another company the other tests, they run tests. And there were an employee sold them on the dark web. So again, your IP is around your IP that being sold on the dark web, either by an employees that want to make a quick buck. Or by hackers that found a vulnerability that they scan the Internet and found that you are vulnerable. And they are stating that somewhere.

Jeremy Weisz  12:10 

So let’s say Ran, that a company like Salesforce or IBM, they hook up into your data feed into all the places on the open web or dark web. And if they see this conversation going on of their company being mentioned, or like there’s been a breach, it could be proactive instead of someone sells it and they find out after they get some ransomware email from someone. Is that accurate?

Ran Geva  12:39 

Yeah, and there’s some companies that are also monitoring illicit activity in the sense of pride, or anti-Semitism, or before mass shooting, or some kind of more of a social level, on networks, that people gonna say they’re gonna do something. It’s not necessarily hacking, it could be also violent. So this is being monitored by some companies as well.

Jeremy Weisz  13:05 

So we’ll talk about lunar in a second, but I’m talking about the use case, who should be using it from keeping society safe, law enforcement, etc.

Ran Geva  13:24 

Exactly. So we have a company that sometimes a nonprofit, that we have two clients that are protecting actually Jews around the world to see if there are going to be attacks on Jewish communities. And that’s kind of a nonprofit organization that is our art service.

Jeremy Weisz  13:48 

The law enforcement like what type?

Ran Geva  13:53 

They’re not law enforcement. So we don’t have directly law enforcement client, but we have a client that is being used by law enforcement. And again, the watching see if they’re going to be arrived somewhere. But in some cases, we have brands that are using our system to see if there are plans to go against their brand worldwide. So or the in some cases, the was they monitored discussion about people that are going to block the arrival of a shipment coming to a port. So they knew beforehand that’s going to happen. So that’s another use case for monitoring kind of a dark web which is kind of a draws name for wherever kind of criminals trying to speak anonymously. Without the risk of them being recognized and started from poor network. That’s when I initially started thinking about monitoring the dark web. I thought dark web is only torrent work. But dark web is a name for basically a medium that people take without being detected. People taking advantage of anonymity, or they think they’re anonymous. But there are ways of getting them be anonymized.

Jeremy Weisz  15:44 

What are some companies out there that you think, should be using this with you that maybe don’t know about you, like what type of companies?

Ran Geva  15:56 

So Lunar, initially, you’re going to be serving. And MSPs, which is managed services, these are companies that are giving security measurements to brands, so they have a hall of where I come to an MSP, I want to see if you can go ahead and monitor my network.

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