Northstar Security Gives AI Agents the Context to Fix Security Risks

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong TV. " I want to introduce you, if you don't already know my friend, Amr Diab.

He's the CEO and co-founder of a new company here called North Star Security. We're going to find out all about it. Let's welcome Amr to the show.

Amr, it's so good to see you. How are you? I'm doing great.

Thank you so much for having me, Alan, and always a pleasure, so thank you. So Amr, we're going to talk a lot about North Star Security, but before we do, let's spend a minute talking about you. You and I know each other, I'm ashamed to even say.

Yeah. No. We've probably known each other, what, 20 years?

Yeah. Twenty-five years, maybe? Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. From the Qualys days. Yes.

So as you know, I was one of the early folks at Qualys. Built the company, took it public, and grew it globally. And after 18 years there, I moved on to build a company in the DSM space called Normalyze, which we sold to Proofpoint at the end of 2024.

And then every time I think I'm done, they pull me back in again. Uh-huh. As the saying goes.

Yes. And this time, I want to solve a problem very dear to my heart that I saw a lot and heard a lot about it from customers from my Qualys days, and I feel like this is the right time to solve it and solve it at scale. And that's why North Star was formed.

It's interesting. I was just out at the QualysCON- Yes ... conference, used to be the Qualys Security Conference, now it's CON.

Correct. Yeah In Austin a couple weeks ago. Yes.

I was talking to the Qualys folks. And look, they got a great bench. Sumedh has done a great job.

He's got a great- Yes ... bunch of very smart people there. Yes.

He's a great friend and a great operator and business- Absolutely. Right? Yeah.

And you and him and Philippe, of course, you guys built an amazing company at Qualys. Thank you. Yes.

Indeed. What was interesting to me there, though, was I think back to when I first met Philippe, 2002 or 2003, and it was all about scanning and finding vulnerabilities, where now everything is about fixing vulnerabilities. Yeah.

How do we fix the risk? How do we, first of all, measure risk, decide what risk is acceptable, but then fix the risk? So much of CON was about remediation.

And this is something, look, I've lived this for the same 20-plus years you have. We may never patch our way out of this thing. Sure.

Yes. And with AI and agents, now we've got AI scale at play. Yes.

Where we could've fixed all the vulnerabilities we used to have. We certainly can't fix all the vulnerabilities we have now. Yeah.

The only way we do it is with AI and agents. Yes. Tell me how North Star, what's the special sauce here?

What's the recipe? Great question, and a segue into the discussion. Yeah.

So as you said, with fixing now is the most important thing in terms of to get ahead of the AI attacks and all these threats that we're seeing and the latest vulnerability, and we're going to see more and more of the zero days getting announced. They say the next eight-plus months are we can have a storm of those coming. So it all becomes understanding where the risk is, where the toxic combinations are in your environment, and where do you need to apply and patch autonomously if you can, and as soon as you can.

And it all starts by having the real context, understanding context. In cyber, context is siloed and disconnected in many different tools, in cloud security, in tools in identity and access, in vulnerability management, in endpoint, in network security. Even there's information that you can gather about your risk by connecting to systems of records like CMDBs, like ticketing tools, like code repositories.

So what we believe at North Star, building that context, that security context graph, and making it available in real-time and available for not just at this point in time, but also at any point in the past, if you're trying to understand an incident or investigate something in your environment. It becomes essential for you to understand where are the risks are, the toxic combinations that we need to pay attention to. But most importantly, for your agents, for your security agents.

As we are moving right now, cyber is going through a major transformation from software as a service to security as an agent. And agents need context to act. And that's what North Star is all about.

We give you that real-time context for your environment so you can act on it and make decisions very quickly and allow the agents to take that information and derive remediation and fix problems autonomously before an AI attacker or a threat can take advantage of it. And hence, that's the vision why we call it North Star. It's the North Star for security.

And when I was at Qualys, every customer was facing this problem. Of course, they're trying to build it by connecting it into data lakes or into Splunk and building teams around it. But that doesn't scale.

It's super expensive. So North Star delivers that as a kind of scalable platform, connects to all your various data within your environment seamlessly and quickly, and builds that context graph and makes it available for agents directly through our platform or via an MCP, so you can use Cloud or other tools to build your own workflows on top of it. You know what I find fascinating, Amr?

This isn't a new problem, right? As you said, this has been a problem for 20 years, ever since we were involved in this. Yeah.

I don't know of many people involved in it longer than us, right? But even though it's an old problem, this is a solution that couldn't exist were it not for the agents and the speed and breadth and capabilities of AI. Correct.

Which is probably why we were never able to solve it all these years. You need it. Yes.

And to solve it before, there are a lot of visibility tools out there, but they're not built for the AI age. Maybe they're updated once a week or once a day. But in an AI world where the threats are changing and zero days are coming at you at a speed we haven't seen before, having that real-time, that ability to see and understand now at any point in time, what does Alan have access to?

What devices Alan own? Are they up to date? Is his EDR up to date?

Is he exposed to any type of vulnerabilities that we are not aware of? Is he being compromised for whatever reason? Having all these pieces immediately available at the fingertip of an agent so the agent can decide and make a decision what they should do about Alan and Alan's devices becomes paramount to really fix the problem and move from a reactive mode to a proactive mode.

And security, the only way I think we can scale moving forward, and a lot of CISOs now are realizing that and talking more and more about it, is to build a more proactive, resilient environment, so attacks coming from AI don't take advantage of it and create other problems for you. Agreed. Another thing that I really admire, and I'm looking forward, though I don't know if I'll be able to see it because it's not written for me, but this is one of the first tools I've heard people talk about it, but I haven't seen it in real life, where quite frankly, it's not made for a human to interface with.

It's made for the agents to interface with, right? Because if we're going to be able to move at AI speed- Correct. Yes ...

we need to talk directly AI to the AI in a way that the AI can take that information in the fastest way, most usable format possible, right? Yes. " Right?

Are we just going to allow the AIs to take this? What do you say to those people, Amir? Yeah.

So first, we give you an... To North Star, it has basically an interface that you can prompt. You can prompt it.

You can ask any questions about your data. You can continue to ask questions. You can immediately drive it to build outcomes, either from reports, from ticketing, to creating workflows.

And all these workflows, you can have them either with a human in the loop, where you initiate the ticket, someone gets notified, and then they get pinged another time, and then maybe only if they don't respond, then a remediation happens autonomously. So it gives you the full flexibility to interact with the data, to talk to the data, to get what you want out of it, just as if I'm, in simple English, talk to the data, get what you're looking for, understand the context, the security issue that you're trying to investigate, and then drive an outcome, either fully autonomous or with a human in the loop supervised, so you can resolve it and remediate it. And that becomes very repeatable.

It could be a policy that you want to enforce on an ongoing basis. It could be just a one-time thing, an incident that you're trying to investigate and to resolve and to fix moving forward. Fair.

I got to ask you again because I'm coming out of Rochon. I went right from Rochon to, where the heck? I was at a security field day, a kind of three-day intense presentations from big companies, Cisco, AWS, HPE- Yes ...

Fortinet. Everybody's talking about we can't patch our way out of this. Yes.

And I believe, I agree with it. We can't patch our way out of this. So when you say we're fixing security risks, talk to us a little bit.

Okay, so my AI interfaced with North Star. I gathered all this data and context- Mm-hmm ... from the graph.

How does that help me get from here to fixing security? Yeah. So one of the things that we do very uniquely is help you really identify what we call the toxic combinations in your environment by giving you the full, getting the visibility from everywhere, from vulnerabilities, from endpoints, from identity and access, and connecting the graph so much together intelligently, you'll be able to determine these kind of most risky situations, most risky combinations that exist in your environment, and to act upon them to remediate them.

And by doing that immediately, you're moving basically from a reactive mode to a proactive mode. And it's you're helping your environment and your team to become a lot more secure by doing it that way. Of course, but we also can interface with reactive tools.

So if you see an incident or you see an alert and it gets immediately escalated, then you can interface with North Star to get all that additional context that you need to act on that incident in real time and in an autonomous way. Because when you interact with us, we give you the state of where things are, where the vulnerabilities are, where the overprivileged access is, where the systems that are not up to date with EDR or other shielding tool that needs to be on them. And once you have that at your fingertips, you can make those decisions and make them drive the outcomes to protect yourself and to patch or to remediate or to fix the problem or to block someone or to do what's required.

Got it. Amir, we only have a few minutes left. I got to do some house chores, for lack of a better word.

Yes. People who want to get more information about North Star Security, where should they go? security is our website.

We're on LinkedIn at northstarsecurity-ai. Book a demo with us. It's to our website, and we would love to engage and get you set up to use the product and- Who is the right person?

What's the profile of the customer? We're selling into mid-market, large enterprise. It's with the CISO security operations, from the CISO to the deputy CISO to security operations, basically, that are managing the day-to-day data from a security perspective and trying to build outcomes to fix problems, to investigate issues within the environment.

This is who is buying us. What do you see is coming next from North Star? Where do you go from here with this?

Oh, we're at the beginning. We're building the platform here to scale. We're going to be integrating also with a lot of external data sources.

We're building our models on the data, on data modeling to understand better toxic combinations. So as soon as you get into the product to tell customers, "Oh, by the way, these are the areas you need to be paying to pay attention to. " So all of that requires special data modeling and that we're working on.

And more focus on different use cases within the environment. So, yes, we have this kind of data platform, but on top of that, we want to be able to give you visibility across all your security, your environment from a security perspective, across identities, across endpoints, across vulnerabilities, across cloud. So immediately you can come in and be able to see where are the issues and where do you need to take action and how you drive remediation and build a more proactive, secure environment.

And of course, all of that is available, will be available via MCP, available to other different various agentic workflows. So you can either do it within North Star, or you can do it completely headless outside of the platform. Really?

Oh, that's pretty cool. So that's the beauty of today with API and MCPs and everything. Yes.

And especially if you're talking agentic to agentic- Yes ... or agentic to database communication, you don't really need the UI. You don't, yeah.

Or the agents don't need the UI. Many companies, actually, that's how they want to approach it. Of course, a lot in cyber, we are used to going to a dashboard.

We're still used to going to a report and reading things and clicking on things, and all of that will be available for customers, but at the same time, if you just want us to use as completely headless and build workflows on top of our data, and you subscribe to a certain incident, a certain notification, as soon as a change happens, a notification happens, you get the data, you get the context, and then based on that, you can use AI to drive the various workflows you want to accomplish. And we're seeing that becoming now more and more the norm with many enterprises. I love it.

Amir, all I can do is wish you well and success. Thank you, my friend. Luck.

But you know what- Thank you ... you know what you're doing. We will all be following closely and looking forward to hearing more about North Star Security.

Thank you so much. I appreciate your time and listening to our story. Appreciate it.

And with that, we will see each other soon. Thank you so much. Yes.

Amir Diba, CEO, Co-founder of North Star Security here on Techstrong TV. We'll take a break. We'll be back.