By Dave DeFusco

In today’s digital world, cyberattacks can disrupt hospitals, financial systems and global companies in minutes, and yet the tools designed to protect organizations often create their own challenges by overwhelming security teams with alerts, dashboards and data that are difficult to interpret. For Sivan Tehila, solving that problem has become both a professional mission and an educational calling.

Tehila is the director of the Katz School’s M.S. in Cybersecurity and CEO and founder of Onyxia Cyber, a fast-growing startup that helps large organizations achieve cyber resilience by leveraging data, asset inventories and agentic AI to predict and prevent cyber risks before they escalate into serious incidents. Founded in 2022, the company provides security leaders with data-driven insights that help them strengthen their defenses, make smarter investments in technology and respond faster to emerging threats. Her leadership and impact have not gone unnoticed. She recently received the Global Infosec Award from Cyber Defense Magazine, recognizing her contributions to advancing the field.

The company’s rapid rise recently earned a high-profile moment when Onyxia Cyber’s mission appeared on the towering digital screens of the Nasdaq Tower in Times Square, a milestone that highlighted how far the young company has come.

“For founders, it’s easy to move from one milestone to the next without stopping,” said Tehila. “This was a moment to be proud of the team and what we’ve built.”

Tehila’s vision for cybersecurity comes from years on the front lines of digital defense. Before launching Onyxia Cyber, she was a chief information security officer, responsible for protecting organizations from increasingly sophisticated attacks. That experience showed her that many security tools focus on collecting information but do little to help leaders act on it.

“Everyone can collect data,” she said, “but you don’t want to pull data without context. You need clean, trustworthy information that helps you make decisions quickly.”

Onyxia Cyber’s platform is designed to do exactly that. By combining large amounts of security data with artificial intelligence, the platform identifies patterns in an organization’s systems and predicts potential vulnerabilities. Instead of simply responding to attacks after they occur, companies can address risks before they become serious problems. Tehila calls this approach “preemptive cybersecurity.”

Using historical data and advanced algorithms, the platform analyzes how an organization’s security environment has behaved over time and predicts where risks may emerge in the future. The result is a shift from reactive defense—responding after an attack—to proactive planning that reduces the likelihood of incidents in the first place.

A key feature of the platform is its ability to turn complex technical information into clear insights for decision-makers. For many cybersecurity leaders, the challenge isn’t a lack of data but too much of it.

“Security teams are often handed dashboards and told to fix the problems,” said Tehila, “but the real work is understanding the ‘why’ behind the data.”

By organizing and analyzing incident trends over time, Onyxia Cyber helps security leaders see whether a spike in alerts signals a genuine breach or simply a noisy tool. In one real-world case, the platform’s historical reporting helped a client demonstrate that it had followed proper security practices after a breach, thus reducing regulatory penalties from nearly $1 million to less than $100,000.

Tehila’s expertise extends beyond entrepreneurship into education. She also helps shape the next generation of cybersecurity professionals through the M.S. in Cybersecurity. The program emphasizes hands-on learning through a real-world Security Operations Center, where students work with the same technologies used by professional analysts. They learn how to detect threats, respond to incidents and design security programs that protect organizations’ most valuable data.

“Our goal is to expose students to the real day-to-day life of cybersecurity practitioners,” said Tehila. “They learn not just how to use the tools, but how to think like security leaders.”

The approach is producing strong results: most graduates secure jobs within months of completing the program, entering a field that continues to face a major shortage of skilled professionals.

For Tehila, whether building a company or teaching students, the goal is the same: preparing organizations to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital threat landscape.

“The future of cybersecurity is about turning visibility into action,” she said. “When you combine the right data, context and technology, you can move faster than the attackers. That’s the key to staying secure.”