Roi Cohen

Hacking as a Calling

He traces his interest in hacking to his military service, where he managed mission-critical systems, according to the Cybersecurity Readiness Podcast. Pulling apart an adversary's malware is still what excites him most. On a Vicarius livestream he described the thrill of studying well-built malicious code, and how close a researcher can get to its author: you can always also relate to the attacker to some extent.

He worked at CyberArk, the identity security company, where he met Yossi Ze'evi. Assraf later said the two had seen security and IT teams there buried in reports and patching flaws by hand: They were shocked to see these people still using techniques from the early 2000s, he told Pulse 2.0.

He also led malware research before Vicarius, and has run penetration tests at hospitals and universities. In a 2020 talk posted by Vicarius, he described one such test, in which he sat in a hospital emergency room with a laptop plugged into a wall socket to map its network.

Offices in a Market and a Coffee Shop

Vicarius started in a small city in Israel with three founders and pivoted as many startups do, he said on the State of the Wolfpack livestream. The first product, a permission manager for low-level operating system functions meant to block whole families of malware, confused customers, and their feedback pushed the company toward vulnerability assessment, prioritization and patching, Assraf wrote.

Money was tight at first. we didn't raise much, he said, and the founders almost bootstrapped the company for its first couple of years. They moved wherever someone would give them free space with a good connection: we switch an office every three months. One office was in the middle of a market in Jerusalem, Israel, another a shack, another an apartment in San Francisco, California, where the founders lived for six months and gathered feedback from the market. Starbucks was one of them, he added.

Taking Over as CEO

The company raised a $24 million Series A in 2022 and a $30 million Series B led by Bright Pixel Capital in January 2024, when it had more than 400 customers, TechCrunch reported. Later that year Assraf announced that he was leaving after eight years as chief executive and handed the role to Cohen. Roi will lead the company to new heights with his solid vision, creative thinking, and elegant style.

As CEO he argues that remediation has to speed up because attackers already have. Scanning every few months and opening tickets can leave a flaw open for months, he said in a Vicarius Studios interview, noting that more than 40,000 new vulnerabilities were discovered in 2024 alone. The window to act has shrunk: from the time of a vulnerability being discovered to that being exploited it used to be months now it goes to minutes. On the Cybersecurity Readiness Podcast he argued for automated defenses kept under human oversight.

Personal Life

He is the father of three young sons. My oldest is four, so three boys at home, he said on the State of the Wolfpack livestream, describing his days as split between being a chief executive and a father. Before children he was a keen rock climber, climbing in Israel, Thailand and Greece. He still volunteers to help organizations recover from attacks, and described helping a hospital through a ransomware and data leak incident.