I’ve spent most of my career on both sides of the cyber battlefield.
For over 15 years, I served in Israel’s elite cyber units, including leading the National Red Team, while working hands-on with defenders in large, high-stakes environments. One day I’d be simulating attacks against critical infrastructure, thinking like an adversary. The next, I’d be embedded with security and IT teams, helping them understand how we got in – and how to stop it from happening again.
That dual perspective shaped everything.
As attackers, we learned how to chain together obscure misconfigurations, pivot through segmented networks, and exploit the tiniest cracks in an organization’s defenses. But as defenders, we saw the other side: teams overwhelmed by millions of vulnerability alerts, unsure which ones actually mattered, and struggling to act fast enough before the next breach.
Over and over, we saw the same pattern: defenders were buried in noise, while attackers needed just one reachable path.
That’s what led us to found Astelia.
We knew from experience that the key to real-world security wasn’t just knowing which vulnerabilities existed, it was knowing which ones were actually reachable. And we knew that to answer that question, you had to understand the network. Not just in theory, but in practice.
That’s where our background gave us an edge.
Mapping network topology is one of the hardest problems in cybersecurity. Many have tried. Most have failed. Why? Because it’s not just about collecting firewall configs or scanning IP ranges. It’s about understanding how traffic flows, how segmentation works, how devices behave in the real world – not just on paper.
We learned this the hard way. In the field, we had to build our own maps from scratch, often under pressure, with limited visibility. We learned how to read the language of networks – how to spot hidden paths through misconfigured rules and forgotten assets. And we realized that if we could turn that knowledge into a scalable system, we could give defenders the same visibility we had as attackers.
That’s what makes Astelia different.
We didn’t build a product. We built a capability—one forged in the real world, under real pressure, by people who’ve lived both sides of the fight.
The asymmetry between attackers and defenders
Here’s a hard truth we learned: attackers only need one opportunity to succeed. Defenders, on the other hand, are flooded by millions of potential vulnerabilities, each one flagged as “critical” or “high” by traditional tools. But not all vulnerabilities are created equal. In fact, most of them are irrelevant in the context of your environment.
As attackers, we knew this. We didn’t need to exploit every vulnerability. We just needed one that was reachable, exploitable, and overlooked. And we knew that defenders were often too overwhelmed to spot it in time.
This is the asymmetry that defines modern cybersecurity. Defenders are playing a numbers game they can’t win. They’re forced to rely on tools that prioritize vulnerabilities based on external threat intelligence and generic severity scores, without any understanding of whether those vulnerabilities are actually exposed in the organization’s environment.
The “all stars aligned” problem
One of the biggest blind spots we saw again and again was what I call the “all stars aligned” problem. For an attacker to successfully exploit a vulnerability, a very specific set of conditions must be met. The vulnerable process must be running. The port must be open. The asset must be reachable – through firewalls, load balancers, VPNs, and segmentation layers. All the stars have to align.
But traditional vulnerability management tools don’t account for this. They treat every vulnerability as equally dangerous, regardless of whether it’s buried behind four layers of segmentation or sitting exposed on an internet-facing asset. This leads to wasted time, wasted resources, and missed threats.
Why exposure management – and why now
We founded Astelia to flip the script. Instead of prioritizing vulnerabilities based on probability, we eliminate the ones that don’t matter, meaning: those that aren’t reachable or exploitable in your environment. We focus on exposure, not just existence.
When we founded the company we weren’t interested in building another scanner or another scoring system. We wanted to give defenders what we always wished they had when we were on the offensive side: a clear, accurate picture of what’s actually exposed. Not what’s theoretically vulnerable—but what’s reachable, exploitable, and worth fixing right now.
That’s the shift we believed the industry needed. And that’s the shift we set out to create.
We’ve taken the expertise from our National Red Team experiences and applied it to network topology mapping in an organization’s existing infrastructure. Based on this, we build a real-time model of your environment to understand how assets are connected and what’s actually exposed.
Then we apply agentic AI to analyze each vulnerability’s technical requirements. By cross-correlating this analysis with network and runtime data, we determine whether a vulnerability is truly reachable and exploitable. If it’s not, we set it aside. If it is, we surface it with clear, evidence-based reasoning and actionable remediation options.
From friction to alignment
This approach doesn’t just reduce distractions: it transforms how security and IT teams work together.
In the past, IT teams would push back on remediation tickets: “This vulnerability isn’t even running,” or “It’s behind two firewalls—why are you sending me this?” And they were right. The tools didn’t have the context to know better.
With Astelia, every ticket comes with proof. We show exactly why a vulnerability is a real risk – because it’s reachable, exploitable, and active. This builds trust between teams, reduces friction, and accelerates remediation. It also gives organizations the confidence to defend their decisions to auditors and boards, with explainable, audit-grade evidence.
The gaps we’re closing
Most vulnerability management tools rely solely on external context. They don’t analyze the vulnerabilities themselves, and they certainly don’t correlate them with the environment. Some newer tools try to add business context – like asset criticality or data sensitivity – but that’s just the cherry on top.
At Astelia, we started with the core question: is this vulnerability reachable and exploitable in your environment? That’s the foundation. Once you’ve answered that, you can layer on business context, threat intelligence, and other factors. But without reachability, you’re just guessing.
What’s next
The future of cybersecurity isn’t about chasing every alert. It’s about clarity, precision, and action. It’s about understanding how attackers think, and building tools that help defenders focus on what really matters.
That’s why we founded Astelia.
