2491 - Staying Ahead of Cyber Threats Through Automated Remediation with Remedio's Tal Kollender

Automated Cybersecurity Remediation: Eliminating Vulnerability Bottlenecks, Mitigating AI Threat Vectors, and Protecting Infrastructure with Remedio’s Tal Kollender In a recent episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Podcast, host Josh Elledge sat down with Tal Kollender, Co-Founder and CEO of Remedio https://remedio.io/, to examine how automated remediation technologies are transforming enterprise cybersecurity and vulnerability management. Tal, an internationally recognized security expert and technology founder whose firm was featured on Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups list, details how modern IT infrastructure is overwhelmed by an influx of threat alerts, configuration drift, and unpatched system vulnerabilities. This conversation delivers an actionable operational guide for chief information security officers, IT directors, and enterprise leaders who want to deploy automated, impact-aware remediation tools, neutralize shadow AI risks across their organizations, and accelerate incident response timelines without disrupting core business operations. The Cybersecurity Remediation Engine: Automating Vulnerability Patching, Neutralizing Shadow AI, and Safeguarding OperationsThe primary vulnerability exposing enterprise digital infrastructure to catastrophic breaches is not a failure to detect threats, but rather the severe operational bottleneck created by slow, manual remediation processes. Tal Kollender explains that security teams routinely face thousands of automated alerts across cloud assets, endpoints, and internal networks, causing critical patches and configuration updates to sit pending for months due to a lack of engineering bandwidth or fear of breaking operational workflows. Furthermore, the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence has democratized cyber offensive capabilities, enabling bad actors to generate exploit scripts and automate reconnaissance at unprecedented speeds. To counter these automated attack vectors, organizations must move beyond passive detection tools and deploy automated remediation platforms that continuously patch vulnerabilities, resolve system misconfigurations, and eliminate unauthorized software in real time. Implementing safe, automated security remediation across complex enterprise networks requires a platform that balances rapid execution with granular operational controls and business context awareness. Deploying automated fixes without testing risks bringing down critical IT infrastructure—such as hospital operating systems or financial transaction processing centers—which is why modern security architectures must incorporate predictive impact analysis and instant system rollback capabilities. By conducting real-time impact assessments before executing patches or software removals, platforms like Remedio allow security teams to safely automate repetitive maintenance tasks while ensuring continuous business operations. Automatically discovering and restricting unauthorized "shadow AI" applications installed by employees further eliminates hidden network backdoors before malicious actors can exploit unmonitored data flows. Ultimately, protecting enterprise continuity demands that C-suite leaders transition from reactive crisis management to an integrated, impact-aware cybersecurity posture. Enterprise leaders must mandate clear organizational policies around browser security, standardizing internal workstations on frequently patched, enterprise-grade web browsers while prohibiting unvetted, niche browser applications with known security backdoors. Conducting regular incident response tabletop exercises and deploying pilot automated remediation programs allows organizations to measure vulnerability closure rates without adding technical overhead. When complete attack surface visibility, automated impact-aware patching, proactive shadow AI discovery, and strict endpoint governance are synthesized into a single defense architecture, enterprises eliminate security debt, protect brand reputation, and predictably preserve enterprise valuation. About Tal KollenderTal Kollender is the Co-Founder and CEO of Remedio, a prominent cybersecurity founder, and an expert in automated vulnerability remediation and enterprise defense. Recognized on Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups list, Tal draws from years of hands-on technical experience in cybersecurity architecture to help global organizations solve complex vulnerability management challenges. She is a featured industry speaker focused on helping enterprise CISOs and IT teams eliminate manual security bottlenecks, automate threat remediation, and build resilient digital infrastructure capable of withstanding AI-driven cyber threats. About RemedioRemedio https://remedio.io/ is an elite cybersecurity platform engineered to automate vulnerability remediation and attack surface management for global enterprises. The platform specializes in delivering unified asset visibility, automated software patching, misconfiguration resolution, shadow AI discovery, and impact-aware execution with automated rollback capabilities. Through safe, impact-tested automation, Remedio enables organizations to eliminate vulnerability backlogs, reduce manual IT workloads, ensure regulatory compliance, and maximize enterprise security resilience. Links Mentioned in This EpisodeRemedio Official Website: remedio.io https://remedio.io/Tal Kollender on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tal-kollender-remedio https://www.linkedin.com/in/tal-kollender-remedio/ Key Episode HighlightsThe Manual Remediation Bottleneck: Shifting organizational focus from passive threat detection to automated vulnerability resolution to close exploitation windows. The AI Threat Escalation Factor: Countering automated, AI-driven cyberattacks with continuous, machine-speed security patching and configuration management. Impact-Aware Automated Patching: Utilizing predictive impact analysis and instant rollback capabilities to apply fixes without risking operational downtime. Mitigating Shadow AI Backdoors: Discovering and restricting unauthorized employee AI tools to eliminate hidden data leaks and entry points. Standardizing Endpoint and Browser Security: Restricting unvetted, insecure browser usage across corporate networks to maintain a hardened security baseline. ConclusionThe conversation with Tal Kollender underscores that achieving true cybersecurity resilience requires moving past manual patching cycles to embrace automated, impact-aware remediation. By standardizing internal threat governance, deploying automated platforms to handle routine system updates, and proactively mitigating shadow AI risks, enterprise leaders can transform a vulnerable IT ecosystem into a highly secure, self-healing corporate asset. More from The Thoughtful Entrepreneur🎙️ Want to be featured on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur? Get your voice in front of 50K+ listeners. 👉 Schedule your guest spot here » https://go.upmyinfluence.com/podcast-guest 🤝 Consultant doing 6+ figures? 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• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means, as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created Podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free Podverified score, free Podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters

• 0:42Speaker 00

  who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting. Visit Podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  With us right now, it's Tal Kollender. Tal, you are the co-founder and CEO of Remedio. You're found on the web at remedio.io, which we have the link all set up in our show notes for the episode. Tal, it's great to have you.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Absolutely a pleasure being here.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. And before we talk about what you do with Remedio, what the platform is, you always love hearing from busy leaders, what they do for fun when they're not at work. And you've picked up a couple of hobbies recently, Muay Thai and guitar. So first, why Muay Thai? How did you find that?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  So apparently, when you, I mean, there are more than I think areas in the US that you cannot walk, you know, by yourself, and you cannot walk alone after, I don't know, 9:00, 10:00 PM. And when they said, oh, you know, like, it's dangerous, you know, like, you need to have someone, or it's better for you to take an Uber. And I'm like, why? And then, oh, you know, you have some, you know, some people can run into you. And I said, okay, so I'll start, you know, being, you know, like, learning some kind of, I mean, I used to know Krav Maga, but now taking very seriously Muay Thai. That's really good, even for my soul.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, and it's just kind of a, you know, what I hear, right? It's, it's just, it's, it feels good knowing it, even if you never, never need it in a real-life situation. Is that kind of what you're experiencing?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yes, but also, like, it helps also, you know, mentally with everything that you, that we go through, you know, like CEOs, etc. Like, it's important that we will have this point of that we can finally say everything, but say everything with your hands and with your legs.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  And what have you been playing on guitar, by the way? So I absolutely love that. I picked up the bass a couple of years ago, and it's just so fun being able to play all the music of my youth and, you know, kind of background, just stuff that I love. But what have you been doing on guitar?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Wow. So I'm trying to do some, you know, like Pink Floyd and other, like, some kind of very, I don't know, like, I would say, things that I used to love, and I still miss them, and I do want to see them all, to hear them all. But yeah, it's this and others as well, like, it's Guns, Guns N' Roses, and like, other things. But that's my type for now.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  I love it. I love it. Yeah, Pink Floyd is, I could play some Roger Waters. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. So, yeah, in fact, I was just going through, like, Shine On You, Crazy Diamond, which is like a 20-some-minute song, if you play the whole thing. And so that's kind of a fun one to, you know, because it's, it just kind of comes in and out with some different things. So, well, very cool, Tal. Thank you so much for sharing. So, Remedio was featured in Forbes' Next Billion Dollar Startups List. You want to share with me how you, what are they, what do they see? What is Remedio? And why is Remedio potentially here, the Next Billion Dollar Startup?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Maybe let's make it very simple. You know, for Remedio, what we do is remediation. And today, with a world full of detection and things that are, you know, lots of alerts, and things that you need to patch all the time, or to close all the time, or remediate all the time, that's why we are here. So, just to show you end-to-end, your, everything about your attack surface within your devices and network, and not only that we can only show you, but we can even close it and remediate everything from config drift, AI governed, patching, application, application control, many things that will make your life, I would say, that will make you, let's say, sleep well at night.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Hmm. So, just taking it back, even a step back, to make it even simpler, imagine now we're in front of a room of eighth graders who are not in business for themselves. Go ahead, let's go ahead and give that definition first for folks that are wanting to make sure we're all singing on the same sheet of music here.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Sure. So, today, every organization, and even if you have, you know, like, you know, small clinic of a few devices, and everything today is done via computers, right, laptops, etc. And of course, like, the cloud, the things that you use for emails and for many other things. So, because or thanks to the AI, I would say, maybe the focus is now back to the devices, right? Like, your device now is running, you run many, many things with the AI, right? Like, using Claude, using AI, using OpenAI, and Codex and whatnot. Now, not only that, but because of what happened a few months ago with the project Glasmin

• 6:17Speaker 01

  and Mythos, etc., like, you saw that there are a lot of vulnerabilities out there that are kind of revealed and being, being out there. But again, and of course, like, now all of the big vendors, they just took it, and they are now trying to keep up, you know, the pace and close them. But what is the problem? Some of the things that they got, they cannot even close, meaning they cannot even patch, because they are too obsolete, or cannot be supported anymore. Some of the things that they got, it's a very long list, they cannot really do everything at once. They, they release every month, some, you know, some, I don't know, like, some items from the list, like, I don't know, maybe,

• 7:01Speaker 01

  maybe 1%. And that will take them a lot of time. And it's not getting any better, because what they used to find, was what they found a few months ago, today, the finding is even more drastic, because you see more findings and more zero days, meaning things that can be exploited and can be exploited without any patch. So, what we do is not only that we have the ability to speed up everything and close it, for the ones that are unclosable or unpatchable, we can do it already. And even the ones that the patch is being released, there are so many organizations that cannot really close everything so fast, so we come

• 7:44Speaker 01

  and help them. Not only, not only patch it, but again, having the ability to show that each and every attack that you see in the market today, and even the ones that you don't know about, the attacker is just moving, once they are in, they move laterally so fast, and they abuse something that is called configuration drift. Those configurations are just there by default, or human error, but it's there, and no one is fixing it. I mean, no one but Remedio. So, our own goal, our own goal is to see it holistically, from the patching, the ones that everybody knows that they need to do, like, every month or so, and the ones, the one thing, or the main thing, that people are not even aware that

• 8:28Speaker 01

  they exist. And even they are, even if they are aware, they don't know how to address it properly fast enough.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, would it be fair to say that this is a, I mean, it's, you know, again, for folks that, you know, need to speak in lay terms here, these are just cybersecurity vulnerabilities that are largely on the edge, right? So, unpatched OSs, a browser plugin,

• 8:58Speaker 00

  you know, an AI agent that has maybe a little bit too much access. That's what we're talking about?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Yes. And unfortunately, it's getting bigger and wider, and people, they just, they just get too many alerts these days from so many systems or solutions that are telling them. And even if you get prioritized, you know, a prioritization from these systems, there are still too many things to address. And you cannot really address it today, because the main, the main way to address the majority of the things is manually.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  The concern over threats, I think, seems to be heightening because of AI. Can you kind of just again explain in layman's terms why it's going to be more important than ever before to make sure that vulnerabilities are well managed, particularly again in those edge user cases? Why do we need to button things up a little bit better in our organizations?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Sure, but in order to answer that, I need to take you maybe, I don't know, 20, 25 years back. So when I was younger, I used to, I mean, I was a hacker, computer hacker, so I used to hack into many things. And it started with video games and actually evolved into creating my own product. But everything back then was very manually. You know, you needed to learn everything, the bits and the bytes and to know how, you know, like to get into things and to move laterally. And it was, that is why back in the days, attacks used to take sometimes even years

• 10:56Speaker 01

  when you really needed to take something from the network and without people to see it or without obviously like the tools to see it. Today, the best thing or what happened because or thanks to the AI is that even someone without any education and doesn't even know how to hack, but they are just curious enough, you know, of how to do it. They can ask Claude, they can ask Gemini, they can ask Codex, they can ask GPT, how to, you know, like kind of the how to hack. But then not only that they can ask them how to hack, they can even tell them the situation and they can build for them the tool that will hack and will get into the whatever thing that they want.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  I mean, sometimes it works, sometimes it is not. But again, the, there are a lot of, I mean, like the trend of successful attacks is getting higher and higher. And we all know that it's not only today, countries versus countries. And then you have like, you know, the old attacking groups. Today you have so many, so many attackers that are just, what they do is they just love doing it even for fun because they can. And it's even, you know, like I seen, I mean, like someone, you know, like, you know, individuals that they want to try just to, oh, let's see if I really, you know, nailed it. So that's basically what we, what we see recently.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And unfortunately, it became very easy.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Hmm. So how does it work when we, when somebody implements Remedio?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  So we have one of the, I believe the largest nonprofit healthcare. Okay, maybe let me give you an example without mentioning their name. But, and they just texted me, I mean, they, okay, let's say that they had a cyber attack. Unfortunately, they called us right after the cyber attack and they said, we need remedio because that's exactly what the attacker did. And no one in the organization, including our most sophisticated EDR, could not even detect it. Actually, in fact, the EDR or the antivirus, I mean, for all days, they detected it as normal behavior, everything that the attacker did, you know, moving laterally on the network, taking this and that and more pieces.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  And then they implemented remedio. They implemented it very fast. Within a week, they had tens of thousands of devices already reporting. And then they saw exactly what we flag as dangerous, as lateral movement, and they start, they started taking actions. Now, they, we, what we also add on top of that, because it's a hospital, okay, so you need to take care that no one is going to, you know, to be impacted because you don't want to, to, I don't like to ruin some, I don't know, operation, operation room or something that, that who knows, but are critical. And that is why we also add on each and every remediation, the impact analysis.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  So if you are going to click here, this is the impact, what will be broken if there is something, right? Like if there isn't, then okay, it's a safe remediation. If there is something, we are telling you. So sometimes they wanted even to close the ones that you have potential impact. And but for those things, they took extra cautious because in remedio, we also add revert. Now, even with revert, so you can undo and roll it back. And then you know that even if you did something and there is any impact, now you are safe. But on top of that, now with the evolution of AI, we also discovered something that is called shadow AI because some people just enjoy installing some DeepSeek and some tooling

• 14:44Speaker 01

  that are not, I don't know if to say legit, but they are not enterprise ready. And they should not be installed on enterprise. And then some of them are actually open a backdoor within the organization and they let an attacker to get in. So we show them all of these, including, you know, like who, someone who just enter clear text passwords so everyone can see the admin of the hospital, you know, like having, you know, like entering his password in clear text and to see how with remedio now, when there is Microsoft patching, they finally, if up until recently, they didn't patch and they waited, you know, for half a year, now with remedio, they do it almost immediately once the patch is released.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Now, that is maybe one of the best case studies that we have. And of course, we, we will be able to share probably in a couple of weeks with everybody. But yeah, that's really nice to get this customer's feedback and of course, like to see that they just sent me a picture, screenshots from the UI saying, we just did in the past 200 days, 2.1 million remediations, million, and everything is automated. So they don't really, yeah.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Oof. That's, that's significant. We think about all of that vulnerability now that's handled. Okay, so remedio.io, to our friend that's listening, maybe they're already researching remedio or they're looking for solutions. Where do they go from here?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  So they go from, for, you know, book a demo, like contact us immediately and our response time is pretty fast, I would say, like it can take a few minutes after, like it will already, they will already get an email back. We encourage everyone, like again, like it's, it's, you know, just even try it, have it, you know, for a trial, enjoy, just close as many things as you want. We, I mean, let's, let's talk afterwards if, in case you want to proceed or not, but we really want to help any organization that we can. We already, we are already helping hundreds of organizations in the world.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And again, like to see the, to see the impact, the good impact that it makes and it frees their time and it shows them the, how, you know, like their life now, they can focus on other tasks instead of doing things in a manual way. That makes a lot of sense. And of course, the risk reduction and everything that's going on right now, that everyone needs to justify the board, what's going on.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, Tal Kollender, co-founder and CEO of Remedio, you're found on the web at remedio.io, R E M E D I O dot I O. Tal, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you for the work you're doing to keep the good guys safe. I appreciate you.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Josh. Thank you.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com. You can start for free with your Pod Verified score, along with free podcast guest training

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