Startups looking for investors, investors looking for startups and journalists looking for free pens were in no short supply at the Tel Aviv Expo this week during Cybertech Global 2025, Israel’s prestige cybersecurity conference.

The show floor was densely populated by investors from around the world, bright-eyed student groups and industry veterans, all milling their way from booth to booth as cybersecurity experts gave keynotes on the latest trends in the industry.

Those trends — namely AI, quantum computing and Google’s planned $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cybertech firm Wiz announced last week — blended into a potpourri that smelled strongly of equal parts Israeli success, cautious optimism and future dystopia.

AI: The security war escalates

Since its inception in the early 90s, the battle for cybersecurity has always been a game of cat and mouse between cybertech developers and nefarious actors — but the mice outnumber the cats, and also the mice want to steal your identity and crash your self-driving car.

And, just as our warring forefathers once traded rocks and sticks for arrows and swords — and then they traded those arrows and swords for guns and bigger guns — the continued development of technology has led to a constant escalation between both sides of the cybersecurity war; the latest upgrade to both sides being artificial intelligence.

Over the last few years, as AI has gotten more sophisticated, both sides have really been banging on all cylinders to thwart each other’s activity. This year’s conference highlighted AI’s remarkable ability to be simultaneously very cool and very alarming:

On the “Black Mirror” side of things, AI can now do things like discover vulnerabilities at lightning speed, craft precise social-engineering attacks, develop malware faster than you can say “develop malware,” and undo passwords like a digital lockpick on steroids.

On the “we’re not all completely doomed (yet)” side of things, AI can also detect threats with superhuman precision, automate incident responses and predict potential attacks before they materialize.

A key example of the push and pull between AI-wielding bad actors and cybersecurity devs can be illustrated just by the existence of one company I bumped into on the Cybertech show floor, MultiKol.

AI has been used by nefarious actors to impersonate people’s voices to scam them — by calling their banks to move their money around or to call other organizations that hold their data to steal information, et cetera.

MultiKol offers a direct defense against this by way of “behavioral voice biometrics.” In short, the company uses AI to verify that if someone calls your bank and claims to be you, it’s actually you and not an AI imposter. Using good AI to stop bad AI — lovely, the circle cybersecurity spins on.

With all this hubbub around AI, different nations are racing to develop as much as they can with it, as fast as they can — but where’s the finish line?

According to Nadav Zafrir, CEO of Check Point, there isn’t one.

“There won’t be a single winner. It’s an endless competition of learning. Whoever learns fastest how to adopt the technology will lead. In the long term, there’s an incredible opportunity to use AI in the world of cybersecurity,” he says, noting that Check Point is “heavily investing in this area,” which includes the establishment of a “global AI cyber research center in Israel and New York.”

A looming quantum threat

If AI is the current cybersecurity boogeyman, quantum computing is the second, scarier monster hiding in the boogeyman’s closet.

Quantum computing uses quantum mechanics — a field of smart-people science involving terms like “superposition” and “entanglement” — to perform computations.

Unlike classical computers that use bits (0 or 1), quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in multiple states simultaneously, enabling them to process information exponentially faster for certain problems.

Explaining how it’s possible is a tall order, but what’s more relevant to the average Joe is explaining what quantum computing makes possible: In short, what once took computers trillions of years to decrypt, a quantum computer might crack in about 10 seconds.

This is very ominous.

Bad actors — on the individual and national level — are already collecting encrypted data, storing it like digital time capsules, waiting for quantum computers to mature enough to crack it open.

Imagine stolen medical records, classified government documents, and corporate secrets just sitting in digital storage, waiting for their encryption to become obsolete.

The quantum threat is a fundamental reimagining of digital security. We’re not just talking about updating a firewall; we’re discussing a complete reconstruction of how we protect information in the digital age.

According to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Prof. Ron Folman, an expert in quantum science and technology, the arrival of this quantum technology could be within the next five to 15 years.

“Quantum computers already work, but they work at the level of, let’s say, a hundred qubits. For real applications, we will need a million,” he explains. “The question is, in one word, scalability.”

So for now, we’re all waiting for the big quantum shoe to drop. Until then, there’s not much to do about it. In the meantime, there’s some good news about the industry in Israel.

The Wiz acquisition

Google’s agreement to acquire Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion is its largest-ever deal and a significant strategic move to strengthen its position in the cloud security and computing market.

For the Israeli cybersecurity industry, this deal makes a huge statement.

“The acquisition of Wiz once again proved that Israel’s ecosystem knows how to build successful cybersecurity companies and create global players,” said Shay Michel, managing partner at Merlin Ventures, during a panel at the conference.

He added that “entrepreneurs today are able to do much more with less — and maintain control over their companies from the very beginning.”

The idea that Wiz’s sale was a huge green flag for Israel’s cybersecurity excellence is shared by a host of industry experts, including former Waze CEO Noam Bardin, who notes that if Waze’s acquisition for $1 billion in 2013 was proof of Israel’s ability to create great products, Wiz’s pending acquisition for $32b in 2025 is proof of Israel’s ability to use those products to build “large, industry-defining companies.”

And so, as the sun sets on yet another Cybertech Global conference, we have a brand-new bundle of very scary things to worry about.

But amid all of the uncertainty that surrounds AI and quantum technology in regard to our cybersecurity, at least we know that there are brilliant minds at work trying to keep our data safe (and that you can always find some pretty good pens at an Israeli tech industry conference).