The New Stack Podcast The New Stack

Speed is a recurring theme in this episode of The Tech Founder Odyssey. Also, timing.

Eilon Elhadad and Eylam Milner, who met while serving in the Israeli military, discovered that source code leak was a hazardous side effect of businesses’ need to move fast and break things in order to stay competitive.

“Every new business challenge leads to a new technological solution,” said Elhadad in this episode of The New Stack's podcast series. “The business challenge was to deliver product faster to the business; the solution was to build off the supply chain. And then it leads to a new security attack surface.”

Discovering this problem, and finding a solution to it, put Milner and Elhadad in the right place at the right time — just as the tech industry was beginning to rally itself to deal with this issue and give it a name: software supply chain security.

It led them to co-found Argon Security, which was acquired by Aqua Security in late 2021, Elhadad told The New Stack, a year after Argon started.

Given the vulnerability of so many systems, it’s not surprising that cyberattacks on applications and APIs increased 82% in 2022 compared to the previous year, according to a report released this year by Imperva’s global threat researchers.

What might rattle even the most experienced technologists is the sheer scale of those attacks. Digging into the data, Imperva, an application and data security company, found that the largest layer seven, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack it mitigated during 2022 involved — you might want to sit down for this — more than 3.9 million API requests per second.

“Most developers, when they think about their APIs, they're usually dealing with traffic that's maybe 1,000 requests per second, not too much more than that. Twenty thousand, for a larger API,” said Peter Klimek, director of technology at Imperva, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. “So, to get to 3.9 million, it's really staggering.”

Klimek spoke to Heather Joslyn of TNS about the special challenges of APIs and cybersecurity and steps organizations can take to keep their APIs safe.

The episode was sponsored by Imperva.

The 20th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) runs Thursday through Sunday at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, Ca., featuring keynotes from notables such as Ken Thompson, the creator of Unix, said Ilan Rabinovich, one of the co-founders and conference chair for the conference on this week's edition of The New Stack Makers.

"Honestly, most of the speakers we've had, you know, we got at SCALE in the early days, we just, we, we emailed them and said: 'Would you come to speak at the event?' We ran a call for proposals, and some of them came in as submissions, but a lot of it was just cold outreach. I don't know if that succeeded, because that's the state of where the community was at the time and there wasn't as much demand or just because or out of sheer dumb luck. I assure you, it wasn't skill or any sort of network that we like, we just, you know, we just we managed to, we managed to do that. And that's continued through today. When we do our call for papers, we get hundreds and hundreds of submissions, and that makes it really hard to choose from."

Ilan Rabinovitch - https://www.linkedin.com/in/irabinovitch/
Alex Williams - @alexwilliams
The New Stack - @thenewstack

When she was a student in her native Israel, Shira Shamban was a self-proclaimed “geek.”

But, unusually for a tech company founder and CEO, not a computer geek.

Shamban was a science nerd, with her sights set on becoming a doctor. But first, she had to do her state-mandated military service. And that’s where her path diverged.

In the military, she was not only immersed in computers but spent years working in intelligence; she stayed in the service for more than a decade, eventually rising to become head of an intelligence sector for the Israeli Defense Forces. At home, she began building her own projects to experiment with ideas that could help her team.

“So that kind of helped me not to be intimidated by technology, to learn that I can learn anything I want by myself,” said Shamban, co-founder of Solvo, a company focused on data and cloud infrastructure security. “And the most important thing is to just try out things that you learn.”

To date, Solvo has raised about $11 million through investors like Surround Ventures, Magenta Venture Partners, TLV Partners and others. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast series The Tech Founder Odyssey, Shamban talked to Heather Joslyn and Colleen Coll of TNS about her journey.

Shira Shamban - @ShambanIT
Heather Joslyn - @ha_joslyn
The New Stack - @thenewstack

At Cloud Native Security Con, we sat down with Solo.io's Marino Wijay and Jim Barton, who discussed how service mesh technologies have matured, especially now with the removal of sidecars in Ambient Mesh that it developed with Google.

Ambient Mesh is "a new proxy architecture that, according to the Solo.io site, "moves the proxy to the node level for mTLS and identity. It also allows a policy-enforcement policy to manage Layer 7 security filters and policies.

A sidecar is a mini-proxy, a mini-firewall, like an all-in-one router, said Wijay, who does developer relations and advocacy for Solo. A sidecar receives instructions from an upstream control plane.

"Now, one of the things that we started to realize with different workloads and different patterns of communication is that not all these workloads need a sidecar or can take advantage of the sidecar," Wijay said. "Some better operate without the sidecar."

Marino Wijay - @virtualized6ix
Jim Barton - @jameshbarton
Alex Williams - @alexwilliams
The New Stack - @thenewstack

Cloud IDEs are hot, but several other trends are taking shape in 2023 that Cloud Native Computing Foundation CTO Chris Aniszczyk highlights in the latest episode of The New Stack Makers.