Why Product Managers Are Key to IoT Security

Why Product Managers Are Key to IoT Security
Daniel Elizalde

My guest in this episode is Mark Felegyhazi, CEO of Avatao. Mark is a cybersecurity expert, who is passionate about strategic risk management, product management and anything that involves humans interacting with technology.

His company, Avatao, is an online training platform for developing IT security skills to build secure software.

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Episode details: Why Product Managers are Key to IoT Security

“I often compare security to technical debt. It’s the same thing. If you go fast and you write substandard code, it’s going to work for a while and eventually it’s is going to backfire and the whole product has to be rewritten, business operations have to stop or something goes wrong and the whole business suffers.” – Mark Felegyhazi

About Mark Felegyhazi:

Mark Felegyhazi is the CEO and co-founder of Avatao, with 15+ years of expertise in networking, security and risk management.

Initially, a telecommunications engineer working with Ericsson, Mark graduated from BME in Budapest in 2001, then earned a Ph.D. degree in IT communication systems at EPFL, Switzerland in 2007, and then spent a few years at UC Berkeley as a security researcher.

His work and interest cover risk management and economic decision-making in security. With his colleagues at UC Berkeley, they uncovered the underground economy of spammers and identified their weak point to disrupt their operations. During his Ph.D. at EPFL, Mark studied incentive issues in self-organizing networks and showed mechanisms to motivate participants to maintain adequate operation and security in a distributed network. Back in Hungary with the CrySyS Lab team, Mark was a member of advanced targeted attacks analyses that uncovered and analyzed the Duqu malware (successor of the famous Stuxnet) featured in the mainstream media. Then the CrySyS team analyzed Flame, Gauss, Miniduke, TeamSpy and other advanced malware attacks.

In 2014, Mark co-founded Avatao with other CrySyS Lab members to help software engineers, students and other IT professionals to build secure software and systems. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Avatao responsible for overall operations, strategy, business developments, sales and marketing, financing and other business issues.

About Avatao:

Avatao is an online training platform for developing IT security skills to build secure software. It offers a rich library of high-quality exercises designed for software engineers, security champions, and experts. Topics cover the phases of SDLC including design, coding, code review and DevSecOps. It is important to stress that we teach defensive security, so we not only show hacker techniques but guide developers to fix the bugs and show them how to properly build an application.

Topics we discuss in this episode:

  • Mark shares his background and about Avatao.
  • How Avatao approaches IoT solutions.
  • The evolution of Avatao and how they teach security.
  • How to evaluate the cybersecurity maturity of your company.
  • Making security a part of your company’s culture.
  • How managers and business leaders should think about security, and how to get started.
  • Why Product Managers are key to IoT security.
  • Advice for Product Leaders who are new to developing IoT solutions.

To learn more about Mark and Avatao:

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