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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

reuters.com

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#12

Can anyone with security expertise clarify what Wiz actually does? Is it a legitimate company or is it fuzzy consultingware?

Wiz uses various API's via read access in your accounts/orgs/subscriptions to assess risk of configuration.

They also snapshot your disks, cloning them to Wiz accounts to provide secrets scanning / vuln scanning / etc against your infra.

These resulting risks / findings are scored and provided in their SAAS Wiz console via dashboards / APIs / integrations with remediation guidance.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#13

Can anyone with security expertise clarify what Wiz actually does? Is it a legitimate company or is it fuzzy consultingware?

They were the one's to first report on DeepSeek's recent data leak, and they've found a few others.

One exploit I remember Wiz finding was "ChaosDB". A flaw in Microsoft's Cosmos DB allowed anyone to use the default-enabled Jupyter Notebook to basically dump and modify anyone's databases, without authentication. Full admin access.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#15
post #11

Wiz seems to only be about 4 years old, as per wikipedia. That valuation in such a short amount of time surely must be some kind of record? Or am I missing something?

~5 years by now. But there is a bit of fine print. The founders all founded another cloud security company in 2010, which was acquired by Microsoft. They were all graduates of Israel's famous Unit 8200. So while the literal company was founded in 2020, it is very likely a lot of both the knowledge, expertise and quite possibly product was already in development before it.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#17

Can anyone with security expertise clarify what Wiz actually does? Is it a legitimate company or is it fuzzy consultingware?

Would also be interested in this. I don't know anyone who uses Wiz. Google says they had 350 million in revenue last year, aiming for 1 billion this year. So 100x revenue TTM. Crazy stuff.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#18

Can anyone with security expertise clarify what Wiz actually does? Is it a legitimate company or is it fuzzy consultingware?

Basically give it read access to your cloud account, and it will scan all of the resources to identify potential miss-configurations. Identifying CVE in software is one thing, but it's identifying incorrectly configured resources that would otherwise be secure can dramatically reduce the risk surface.

A lot of cloud providers already have little hints like "hey - did you mean to create this account in God mode?" or "It is recommended not to create this god mode json key file" - Wiz is taking this to the next level of detail

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#19
Google has some amazing negotiating skills - paying 50% more for something they literally tried to get not even a year ago... (they tried to get it at 23 billing not even a year ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034

That being said, Instagram and WhatsApp were expensive for Facebook and those ended up being a steal. Time will tell, as usual.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#20

Can anyone with security expertise clarify what Wiz actually does? Is it a legitimate company or is it fuzzy consultingware?

It is a very legitimate tool. It identifies misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in cloud deployments. Anything from a container with a known-vulnerable package in the manifest to a workload with improper firewall rules.
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