97. The God-Level Hacker: How One Founder Is Building the World's Most Powerful Offensive Cyber Tool (with Alexis Lingad)

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40 engineers, one full working day, totally free. Go take it. ysecurity.io slash startups. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Security Podcast of Silicon Valley.

I'm one of your hosts, Jon McLachlan. I'm joined with the other host, Sasha Sincovich. Greetings, everyone. And today we have an amazing guest, Alexis Linga, who is the founder and CEO of KenoSec.

Yes, yes. Welcome to the show, Alexis. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining us. Would you like to share with all of our listeners, like, what have you been up to over there at KenoSec? Yeah, currently we're in SF and we just built, like, the cyber weapon.

It's not really a cyber weapon, but, yeah, I mean, they call it a cyber weapon that can, what do you call this, be the next volunteer that takes action and then take the bad guys out or neutralize high-profile threats within the world. So it's mostly volunteer for offensive cyber operations. It's Palantir for offensive cyber operations with a cyber weapon. Expand on that a little bit.

Like, what does that mean? How does it work? Yeah. So basically we created, like, a God-level hacker that can, what do you call this, gather intelligence for some specific target.

And after that, we have, what do you call this, capabilities to hack within the digital, within the fiscal realm. And we use those capabilities in order to neutralize those operations of the high-profile threats. Like, for example, if there's terrorists, we hack them regarding their financials in order to stop all of those things or with making them bad with the social and stuff like that or just, you know, make their lives miserable and stop operating in this specific country of the one who purchased our product. And this has a potential of being a very impactful tool.

Can you tell us what prompted you to create the product and the company behind it? Yes, yes. So when I was a kid, I wanted to become Batman. That's why I learned hacking.

And then when I was in college, I hacked my college and gave them the report of how I hack in so that I can help them. But they didn't like it, so I got kicked out. What college was that? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I cannot tell it in here. Yeah, I mean, it's a bad condition. We mentioned something. This is a very powerful tool, and I just want to double-click.

With adoption of AI, people start talking about the governance and the impact on human life. How do you balance the power behind the AI technology, especially when you chain it? And I imagine this is one of the things that you guys do is you chain multiple agentic executions, you added very explicit contexts. How do you balance the impact that can be produced by the agents and the safeguards?

Oh, yeah. So basically, we have a scoping at the very, very beginning of every attack that we're doing. And whenever we already have a scope, we go with that and then see all of the attack surfaces within and check if we're going outside of that specific attack surface, then usually it will have a kill switch in order to not hack the whole world. But we know that certain models are not honoring kill switches.

And if you're open to talk about the models that you're using, the high-level technology, I think it would be very interesting to discuss it. Yeah, yeah. So technically, in the background that we have, we are using a lot of models for a certain specific task. But we are also creating our own LLM called Skynet.

I mean, forget about the name. It's just an internal naming that we have so that we can remind our team that, hey, we're doing this to prevent Skynet. I'm sure you don't need to remind them. The name is very memorable.

Yes, yes. So yes, this one is the one that is continuously feeding the God-level hacker that we have in all of the commercial things that we're currently doing, like, for example, offering the AI Pentest to a lot of enterprise companies and stuff like that. So all of the strategies that our AI agent is doing in there is being fit in this Skynet LLM in order for it to be much more intelligent and continuously learning a lot of other things so that it will be much more powerful when it comes to hacking. So yeah, that's what we're using right now.

And you used a very interesting word in your answer. That word is enterprise. Yes. We know that enterprise customers are looking to adopt AI technology, but the technology we're discussing here is very different.

It has abilities and capabilities to find areas of exposure that should, some might argue, should never be found. Others would argue it's much better that you find it than someone else. How do you find traction with enterprise customers? Yeah, so we started with a pen testing companies because this pen testing or security testing or hacking companies already know what we're dealing or already know the tools.

So technically, they're the easiest ICP for us, while in order for them to have more revenue, more profit, more customers without hiring more pen testers, they can just have our tool in order to do it with just two, three, five people and have 1000 customers and stuff like that. And after the pen testing or the security team within the pen testing company, we're also providing this to enterprise that has security team inside. As of now, we are in talks with Puma and the CISO of Puma just joined us as an advisor also that will connect us to other CISO within the Europe. Nice.

That's the fashion brand, right? Sports brand. Yeah. Sports brand.

My bad. Sports brand. Of course. There are some time that they become a fashion brand.

I think around 2010 below or something, but it didn't work out. So they go to sports brand again. I think they're in the top three sports brand, top four or five. I love it.

And that's real traction. That's like, you know, selling to a real company that is not just a tech company. You're not just part of the tech bubble or ecosystem and being able to close deals with that type of customer. That's a huge positive signal as an entrepreneur.

And you know, like being an entrepreneur, especially in this day and age when things are changing so fast and they're changing at an increasing rate, you have to be a little bit crazy to step in and say, okay, we're going to build this thing and really start from nothing. So what's your story? How did it, how did you get off the ground? You just saw all of these great tools and you put them together and you said, this is a product and we can build a company around this or what's the founding story there?

Well, I started this solo. And then when we became the number one in Expo and a lot of other traction that we got, then I hired a CTO, which is Coke and then COO, which is Arne. And then a lot of other people afterwards. Did you raise?

Yes, yes. Congratulations. That's an achievement. Yeah, yeah.

Especially if you're in the top three. It's very, very fast when it comes to racing. So yeah, I mean, to answer your question, how it started, how it all started. It's like, because this is my second startup, by the way.

The first startup that I have is after I got kicked out, I mean, no one wants to hire me. So I created my first startup and then I became a national hacking champion twice. And then I authored a book called Cyber Defender, which told all of my crazy story on how I started hacking. And then I created a lot of products, but failed.

But there's one product in my first startup that succeed, which is Hakuna Anti-Hack. And this Hakuna Anti-Hack is the first mobile app in the world that track hackers. And it gained millions of users worldwide. And after 2018, we became the startup of the year by Impact Hub.

And then 2020, successfully exited that company. And then after that, there's one month that I tried to retire, but it gets boring. So I went to Germany and yeah, I mean, work as an ethical hacker, dig deeper, surround myself with smarter people when it comes to ethical hacking. So, you know, I will grow more because, you know, I think you can grow more if you're surrounded with people that is much, much, much, much smarter than you.

And I got humbled a lot in there, which is really, really good experience. So in order for us to counter that looming threat, we created the weapon first. And to counter them, I mean, it's like a cybersecurity arm race that they are telling. So, yeah

Yeah, I mean, that's the world that I am envisioning. And hopefully, that specific weapon will be autonomous and cannot be controlled by, you know, by some evil people. So what we're trying to do in there is, if ever that there's someone using it, the one that is using it will be hacked first. So that we can really make sure that the users are not the high profile threat themselves.

I want to double click into something. You said something that made me think something different about the product and I want to clarify. Are you envisioning a product that will go after the attacker or its main purpose is to identify vulnerabilities across all of the layers? Or maybe it's a staged approach where you build a system that helps to identify, exploit across all of the layers of the security.

We talk about application, infra, corporate and make sure there is no lateral movement exploited. And then maybe later you envision the add-on or a logic that will try to reverse hacking to the initial attack. So basically, to make everything clear or simple, we hack the client as just like a realistic hacker. So when we say realistic hacker, we will not limit ourselves with just vulnerability analysis.

We will exploit it, chain the exploit, escalate privilege and see if we can gain more exploit and see if we can have much more context of the other attack surface so that we can have more exploit in different attack surfaces. And that's how a realistic hacker do this kind of thing. And that's the value that we are providing in the enterprises that, hey, this is how the bad guys will hack you. And here, this is the report.

And we give the report to them, the POC. And they can also see in our platform how the hack works. So they can watch it live hacking. So that's one of the most entertaining part for our clients, by the way.

And all of the things that you're seeing in the movie where it's escalate, it add user, it deleted some kind of things, stuff like that. Or it escalated privilege. All of those things, they can see it. It's transparent.

And in the report, they can see also some fixes in there that they can put. We also help them fix all of those things and stuff like that. Be careful. The governments are going to come around and declare eminent domain, which is like they have the right to the property and they'll just buy it.

And they'll force it. It's the same rules that they use to buy land. We are actually preparing for that. You're preparing for eminent domain acquisition?

Yes, because what it causes. Yeah. Especially the way you talk about it. It's very military technology.

It's very offensive. We are preparing for all of those things because once we enter this domain, we all know that there's a lot of looming threats regarding those kind of things. And we prepared something for that. Okay, well, that's good.

Another question that crosses my mind is that all of these LLMs, they have guardrails and there's safety programs and AI safety programs and very rigorous terms of service. And now there's that ISO 42001 standard. And everyone is like, let's play nice. Let's play by the rules.

Here's the rule book. How does your software get around that? Because clearly breaking into systems is not part of the, it's an okay use in terms of their terms of service for Amphropic and OpenAI. So how does that work?

Yeah, so that's why we have this kind of... Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's purely without limits and without anything, without guardrails and stuff like that. And we can do a lot of things in that.

So that's why we are having those kind of things for specific chain of exploit and digging deeper and stuff like that. Because for frontier LLMs, they can do information gathering, exploit, and sometimes vulnerability analysis. But digging deeper, chaining of exploit, escalating privileges, you need to do a lot of things in order to just do that. So I imagine you use, this is my educated guess, use models similar to Grok that don't have those built-in guardrails.

And you probably fine-tune further with additional context based on your expertise and experience that team has. Yes, yes. And a bunch of other models that are pretty open. Will your product social engineers way into systems?

Well, we have this case that our AI agent hacked the web application of our client and then get all of the API keys of that specific client. And one of those API keys is recent API key. And then our AI agent used that recent API key in order to get the admin email. And then after getting the admin email, it sent internal phishing to all of the companies.

And I think that's, you can say, social engineering. Yeah, that's social engineering. And my God, that's like spear phishing. Yeah, that's what I am telling a while ago that we are not just a web pen testing company.

It's like on all attack surfaces, like giving the real value because all of the competitor, they will just stop in the, okay, expose API keys. That's it. And it makes sense, right? Because in the last five to 10 years, there's been so much money poured into the application layer security.

There are a lot of, arguably, there are a lot of good solutions out there. And should you adopt them fairly, you have a good coverage. But the security of the organization is so much more than the application layer or the web entry point. There are so many other ways to infiltrate the organization.

And some of those things that you've talked about, you talked about the networks, you talk about the IoT devices that might be on the network, then would allow you to do a lot of movement. Phishing is still pretty successful way to get into the organization. And there are some solutions that are meant to protect, but this is a cat and mouse game. Yes.

The attacker is always very creative and tends to move a lot faster than the defense against that attack. So in other words, you much rather be the friends with the attacking force that has all of the knowledge and expertise Yes. in order to avoid your controls that meant to protect and still find the gaps because there is no, there is one thing that we know for sure, there is no such thing as utopia, there's no such thing as perfect system. And with the complexity of systems that we built today and with all of the changes in supply chain, it's quite feasible that there is something that is not known.

I can guarantee you there are things that we don't know. Yeah. If you could go back in time and meet a younger Alexis, would you take that opportunity? And if you would, what advice would you have for your younger self?

Yeah. I think I will take that opportunity because whenever you start up your first startup, you will have a lot of failures or you will have a lot of mistakes, right? And I will go back and then tell my little self that, hey, here are the mistakes that you should learn from or so that you will not do that when you started your first startup and a lot of other things. But would your younger self listen to your older self or were you a rebellious, skeptical?

Well, you know, I was a father of a pastor and a lot of them just listen on what the Bible says. But for me, I am critically thinking. So I'm critically thinking of all of those things that is being fed to me. So technically, if ever that my future self fed that kind of information to me, then I will critically think also if this makes sense.

If this makes sense, then probably, yeah, I will listen to myself. But yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

Interesting. I appreciate good skepticism and I appreciate a good mistake too because you really learn from it. And it's like one of the best ways to learn. And if I went back and I met my younger self and I gave a whole bunch of like things to watch out for, I know myself, like I would be very skeptical of my future self.

I would be skeptical of anyone. Maybe that's one of the things that drives us to be entrepreneurs is like we're just skeptical that this is the way it has to be. And so like let's fix it and let's change things and let's make things better and like let's build new systems, new weapon systems to like accelerate everything that's about to happen. Just help that along.

Help it move on faster. So here we go. Okay. Well, thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in to another episode of the Security Podcast of Silicon Valley.

I was one of the hosts, Jon McLachlan, joined with Sasha Sinkevich, the other host. Thanks everyone for joining. And our amazing guest, Alexis Lingad, the founder and CEO of Kinosik, the new weapons technology. So stay tuned and be on the lookout for those new hackers, all of the agentic bots flying around.

If you listened to the show and you found it useful, found it interesting, please share it with your friends and rate us. Comments and feedback most appreciated if you feel it so warranted. And please stay tuned for another episode of the Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. This has been a YSecurity production.

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