Microsegmentation has been a known best practice in cybersecurity for years. The problem is that it was almost exclusively available to large enterprises with the budget, the personnel, and the years required to implement it manually. Zero Networks is changing that by making the same protection automated, agentless, and fast enough that a CSO can deploy it in under 40 hours across an entire year of operation.
Yuval Goldberg, VP of Product at Zero Networks, sat down with IsraelTech at CyberTech to explain what the company has built, why it works differently from legacy solutions, and why customers at Black Hat are showing up to the company’s booth to sell the product for free.
The Problem: Lateral Movement After a Breach
The threat Zero Networks is designed to address is lateral movement. When an attacker breaches one part of an organization, the real damage usually comes from what they do next. They move from the initial entry point across the network, gaining access to more sensitive systems along the way.
Goldberg uses a clear example. If an attacker compromises your finance team, the goal is to contain them there. You do not want them reaching your R&D environment, your production systems, or anything else. If they stay contained, the damage is manageable. If they can move freely, the breach becomes a catastrophe.
Stopping that movement is microsegmentation. The challenge has always been implementation. Traditional approaches require significant manual labor, extensive configuration, and often take years to deploy across even a portion of a network. Zero Networks automates the entire process.
How the Automation Works
Once you define what you want Zero Networks to protect, the system learns your network environment and builds the segmentation rules automatically. For most organizations, the initial setup requires essentially no ongoing configuration from the customer. The system keeps learning as the environment changes, updating its rules without requiring intervention.
Goldberg notes that even the most cautious enterprise customers, the ones who start by reviewing every rule manually before approving it, tend to move to full automation after they see how consistently the rules perform. The system is learning the actual behavior of the network, so the rules it generates reflect what is really happening rather than what someone assumed would happen.
The product is also agentless, which matters for IT teams. Deploying and maintaining agents across a large organization is friction-heavy work, and IT teams are already stretched. Removing that requirement means the security team is not creating additional overhead for the people who run the infrastructure.
Three Layers of Protection
Zero Networks operates across three distinct layers, which Goldberg describes as central to what makes the solution different.
The first is network microsegmentation, isolating parts of the network so that a breach in one area cannot spread to others.
The second is access control for privileged ports. Traditionally, organizations either leave privileged ports open, which creates a persistent vulnerability, or close them and require IT staff to open tickets with the security team every time they need access for maintenance. Zero Networks closes the ports by default and opens them only to the specific authenticated user requesting access, for a defined window of time. Critically, the port remains closed to everyone else, including any attacker who might be scanning for open ports at that moment.
This MFA-at-the-port-level approach is patented. The distinction Goldberg draws is that other MFA solutions authenticate at the application layer, meaning the port itself is already open when authentication happens. Zero Networks authenticates before the port opens, which eliminates the exposure window entirely.
The third layer covers identity, specifically service accounts. The system learns which service accounts communicate with which, and flags any account attempting communication that falls outside the established baseline. This gives the product coverage at the network, access, and identity layers simultaneously.
The Customer Adoption Story
The company’s biggest sales challenge is not price or competition. It is credibility. The solution performs so differently from what security teams are used to that the initial reaction is often skepticism. Goldberg describes a POC where a customer told him directly: I do not believe you, but if you are actually doing what you say you are doing, you are the next big thing.
By the end of the POC, that customer was trying to connect Zero Networks with his brother, an investor.
The social proof problem solved itself once the customer base grew large enough that reference customers could speak on the company’s behalf. At Black Hat, Zero Networks has had customers show up at the booth voluntarily to talk to prospects, without being paid or asked. Goldberg asked one of them why he was doing it. The answer: he had been fully segmented within months of deployment and had spent roughly 40 hours total on the solution across an entire year, less time than it takes him to prepare a board presentation. As a CSO, the ability to sleep at night knowing lateral movement is contained is worth more than most line items in a security budget.
Who Zero Networks Serves
Historically, microsegmentation was a capability reserved for large, heavily regulated organizations, major banks, energy companies, critical infrastructure. The manual implementation burden made it impractical for anyone else.
Because Zero Networks automated the process, the customer base now spans from those same large enterprises down to SMBs. The company does not focus on a specific vertical. Goldberg frames the breadth of the customer base as the clearest evidence that the automation claim is real: if implementation were still difficult, smaller organizations would not be using it.
AI on Both Sides of the Attack
One point Goldberg makes that is worth dwelling on: attack groups are increasingly using AI to automate their operations. An automated attack operates at a speed and scale that manual defenses cannot match. The only effective response is an automated defense that can operate at the same speed.
This shifts the frame for how to think about Zero Networks. It is not just a more convenient way to do what security teams were already doing. It is a response to a fundamental change in how attacks are structured. As the offensive use of AI accelerates, the organizations that have automated their defenses are the ones that will be able to keep up.
About Yuval Goldberg and Zero Networks
Yuval Goldberg is VP of Product at Zero Networks, an Israeli cybersecurity company focused on automated, agentless microsegmentation and zero trust network access. Zero Networks protects organizations against lateral movement through three layers: network segmentation, MFA-gated port access, and service account identity protection. The company serves customers across financial services, energy, critical infrastructure, and SMBs. Goldberg spoke with IsraelTech at CyberTech in Tel Aviv.
