Cyber Espionage & Entrepreneurship with Karim Hijazi

Karim Hijazi, Founder & CEO at Prevailion and host of the Introverted Iconoclast podcast, comes to Hacker Valley Studio to discuss his varied experiences in entrepreneurship. With a humble start in bartending, Karim explains how learning about people inspired his exploration into counterespionage and cybersecurity. Armed with stories from the streets of NYC to the hallways of his own companies, this episode is a look into the mind of a successful entrepreneur and founder of 2 incredible businesses. Timecoded Guide: [00:00] Bartending in NYC and its overlap with espionage and entrepreneurship [07:14] Real-life knowledge application in cyber intelligence  [12:15] Founding Unveillance and being acquired by Mandiant  [18:22] Karim’s entrepreneurial mindset and his journey with Prevailion  [24:51] DIY podcasting with Introverted Iconoclast and learning to tell his stories   Sponsor Links: Thank you to our sponsors Axonius and AttackIQ for bringing this episode to life!  Want to learn more about how Mindbody enhanced their asset visibility and increased their cybersecurity maturity rating with Axonius? Check out axonius.com/mindbody AttackIQ - better insights, better decisions, and real security outcomes. That's why we partnered with them to create free cybersecurity trainings! Check it out at academy.attackiq.com   How do your experiences in bartending and espionage overlap? The jobs taken as a means to an end just might teach something invaluable. This was the case for Karim, who took a job bartending to make ends meet while he figured out what he wanted to do with his future. At the time, cybersecurity and counterespionage weren’t on Karim’s radar, but bartending taught him about people; how they act when they want something and how to connect with them even in the busiest and most public places. Learning this changed the game for Karim when he got into the espionage world and assisted him even more so when he became an entrepreneur in the industry. “It's just learning the way to slowly gain a confidence level with someone. It's actually where the word "con man" comes from, confidence man. Ultimately, that is how you get the information you need.”    What are the different aspects that organizations or individuals look at with counterintelligence? At Karim’s own firm, the shift from competitive intelligence to counterintelligence focused around three security aspects. One, identifying weak spots and vulnerabilities, noticing your points of exploitations and vectors of attack. Two, taking advantage of disinformation, using it to root out moles within an organization and throw off cyber adversaries. Finally, three, finding out where your information is going and noticing where there is weaker security than your own. Karim emphasizes that in this third aspect, it is not so much about an organization’s strategy when the information is still at home. It’s harder to secure information once it goes elsewhere. “A controlled rumor within an organization can do several things. It can weed out a mole that you may have, a spy within your organization that maybe you don't know about, that's been able to be hired and gotten through the background checks and whatnot.”   When you look back to starting your journey as an entrepreneur, what are some of the wrong assumptions you made early on?  Karim, like many entrepreneurs, was under the impression when he founded his first company, Unveillance, that he should be seeking to hire, not to do anything himself. While hiring is an important part of being a business owner, Karim has realized that it's better to learn how every piece of the machine of a company works before hiring. Trying things out for himself and taking a chance on his own abilities hasn’t been easy, but it’s made him a better leader for his employees. If they drop the ball or need his assistance, he’s able to lead from a place of understanding and call the shots with his own vision in mind and his own knowledge to back hi