Yossi Barishev's Speaker Profile
From nation-state incident responder to the founder redefining IAM
Meet Yossi Barishev, front-line incident responder against nation-state attackers, former security-operations leader inside one of the most targeted companies on earth, and founder building to fix the identity failure the entire industry keeps working around.
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The One-Liner
(for host intros)
My guest today has spent his entire career on the front line of security, fighting nation-state attackers at CyberArk, Sygnia, and Fireblocks, and walking into Fortune 100 enterprises' worst days as the incident responder who reverse-engineers how elite attackers got in. Across all of it, the same root cause kept surfacing: not exotic zero-days, but identity. So he left to fix it. He's now the founder redefining IAM, with a blunt message for security leaders in the age of AI attackers: identity is the only perimeter left. Please welcome Yossi Barishev.
Biography
Who is Yossi Barishev?
Yossi Barishev has spent his entire career on the operational front line of security. He started in Israeli Military Intelligence leading a DFIR team against nation-state adversaries, ran CyberArk’s Global Cyber Defense & Response Center, served as one of Sygnia’s most senior enterprise security consultants, a lead incident responder for Fortune 100 companies and critical infrastructure, and went on to lead security operations, strategy, and innovation at Fireblocks, one of the most targeted environments on earth.
Walking into other people’s worst days, the same root cause kept showing up. The breach was rarely an exotic zero-day. It was identity – an account or a system nobody was really governing. Over time, those stopped looking like separate incidents and started looking like one unsolved problem.
So he left to build for it, co-founding a stealth identity-security company set on fixing IAM from the ground up rather than treating its most expensive symptoms. His thesis is contrarian and practitioner-tested: AI didn’t break identity, it exposed how broken it already was.Â
Resources
Highlights
- CEO & Co-Founder of Way Security: venture-backed, building to fix IAM at the infrastructure layer instead of patching its symptoms.
- Led Security Operations, Strategy & Innovation at Fireblocks one of the most targeted environments on earth, securing the infrastructure behind trillions of dollars in digital-asset transactions.
- Advised Fortune 500 & Fortune 100 enterprises through major breaches lead incident responder against state-sponsored APTs and commercial threat actors.
- Ran CyberArk’s Global Cyber Defense & Response Center defending a world-leading cybersecurity vendor against nation-state attackers.
- Started on the front line in Israeli Military Intelligence as a DFIR team leader over a decade fending off APTs off the doorstep of the world’s most prominent enterprises.
- Featured in The Jerusalem Post, CTech, Business Insider, NY Tech Media, NewsBlaze & Singapore Wire named a cybersecurity founder to watch
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Media appearances
Listen to Yossi Barishev's previous interviews
Topics
What your listeners can learn
Topic #1
Everyone’s racing to put AI on top of identity. Yossi’s blunt counter-take, earned over years on the response side: AI didn’t create the identity problem, it just made it impossible to ignore. Identity infrastructure has always been fragmented, inconsistent, and held together by manual reconciliation. Now that AI agents act on that data autonomously, the cracks stop being latent and become operational risk at machine speed. He walks hosts through what’s actually broken, why it’s an infrastructure problem and not a tooling gap, and what teams have to fix first.
Listener takeaways:
- Why “we don’t have enough tools” is the wrong diagnosis, and what the real one is
- What changes the moment software, not humans, starts acting on identity data
- The hard number: roughly 90% of organizations hit an identity-related incident last year
- The unglamorous work every enterprise must do before going “AI-first”
Topic #2
After years as a lead incident responder, Yossi’s most contrarian observation is that the breaches that hurt most aren’t exotic. Attackers walk in the front door, and the door stays open because fragmented identity stacks can’t apply consistent controls across every system that matters. He reframes security posture around one metric most leaders don’t track: coverage — how much of your estate your controls actually reach.
Listener takeaways:
- Why your IAM is only as strong as what it’s actually enforced on
- The legacy-app blind spot: 71% of enterprises still can’t apply SSO or MFA everywhere
- How attackers pick the weakest link and why uneven coverage hands it to them
- A practitioner’s way to measure real posture vs. dashboard posture
Topic #3
What keeps identity functioning in most enterprises isn’t modern architecture, it’s people. Skilled practitioners burn their days as the glue between systems that refuse to talk to each other: reconciling CSVs, mapping entitlements, cleaning identity data. Yossi calls this the “human middleware” problem, and he argues it’s where most IAM risk quietly accumulates, invisible in dashboards, fragile during incidents, and impossible to scale.
Listener takeaways:
- What “human middleware” is and why it’s a security risk, not just an ops cost
- Why this model breaks during audits and incidents, exactly when it matters most
- How manual reconciliation becomes autonomous error once AI enters the loop
- What it takes to get humans off the critical path safely
Topic #4
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