Cybersecurity has never been short of innovation or new ideas.
But what does it take to turn an idea into a successful business? And how do start ups find a niche in what can be a crowded market, and convince CISOs to invest in their technology?
And once that’s done, how do they scale up the business, and move from founders to leaders?
Benny Czarny created OPSWAT more than 20 years ago, to develop a common language for security applications.
Today, the business is best known for its “firewall of data” approach to detecting and removing malware, known as content disarm and reconstruction, as well its Metascan tools that combine more than 30 antivirus engines to maximise threat detection. But building these technologies, alongside building a business, was not always easy.
In the first of an occasional series of interviews with founders, we speak to Czarny about his journey as an entrepreneur and as a business leader in cybersecurity.
And we discuss his new book, Cybersecurity Upside Down, and why Czarny thinks we need a different approach to cybersecurity.
About our guest:
Benny Czarny is the Founder and CEO of OPSWAT, a global cybersecurity company focused on protecting the world’s most critical infrastructure, including banking, energy, nuclear, defense, water, and manufacturing.
For over two decades, Benny has worked closely with governments and enterprises to solve real-world cybersecurity challenges. His focus has been consistent: stop threats before they execute, not after they are detected.
Benny is widely recognized as a pioneer of Content Disarm and Reconstruction, CDR, a category he helped define and bring to market. This prevention-first approach removes threats from files rather than attempting to detect them, fundamentally changing how organizations handle untrusted content. His work has played a key role in shifting the industry’s thinking around trust, data movement, and risk, especially as AI introduces new and more complex attack surfaces.
Cybersecurity Upside Down is his first book. It reflects his journey challenging long-standing assumptions and building technologies designed for how attacks actually happen. Benny wrote this book to help drive a critical shift in the industry, from detection-first to true prevention, at a time when protecting critical infrastructure has never been more important.
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