The Battle for Your Computer

CHAPTER 16A Professor and a Hacker—Academia and Cybersecurity

“When Yuri, a Ben‐Gurion University student, started working with us, he realized the language he and his classmates were studying in their computer science classes was irrelevant,” Liron Tancman, who founded CyActive with Shlomi Boutnaru, tells me. “He asked the university to teach them Python because that's what's relevant in the industry, and they switched to Python. At one point, Shlomi was teaching at the university, his classes were 600% oversubscribed, and every year, we could fish all the most suitable candidates. Later on, our partnership expanded to internships and joint research projects.”

Israel's major academic centers are not, for the most part, private institutions, but state‐funded bodies under the Council for Higher Education. Despite taking a few cybersecurity courses as part of my law degree, I don't personally feel that my academic education has made much of a difference to my path as an entrepreneur; what pushed me and my friends into this field was our shared background in Unit 8200. But many other leading cybersecurity entrepreneurs did acquire their education and skills at Israeli universities: Check Point's Gil Shwed studied computer science at the Hebrew University, and his partner Shlomo Kramer studied math and computer science there too. Mickey Boodaei, Kramer's partner at Imperva, studied computer engineering at the Technion; Island's Dan Amiga studied math and computer science at the ...