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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

reuters.com

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#311
post #256

> Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors > Wiz agreed to acquire Tel Aviv-based Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, for $50 million in December 2023. In April 2024, the company acquired cloud detection and response startup, Gem Security, for around $350 million > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy…

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#313
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF does that mean?

Are you aware Wiz’s co-founders were part of Israeli cyber intelligence division known as Unit 8200? The “Israeli NSA”

So what? Technologies with military and intelligence origins become available to civilians all the time. That includes the Internet itself, which was originally sponsored by DARPA.

Would you rather they have kept the technology to themselves?

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#314
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wiz by itself is a great business and public markets will price it accordingly, but Google is able to price it much higher because of its unique position. Wiz + GCP sales team will boost adoption of the main product, a Google branded security tool keeps eyes from looking out, and of course, the ability to move huge amounts of revenue from competitors over to GCP is something only a hyper-scaler can tap. At 36x+ valua…

On what are you basing your opinion that this is a "great deal"? Google is going to have to earn close to $100B in profit attributable to this acquisition over the next 10 years in order to financially justify it.

> On what are you basing your opinion that this is a "great deal"? Google is going to have to earn close to $100B in profit attributable to this acquisition over the next 10 years in order to financially justify it.

Maybe like the Motorola acquisition - not so much the profit attributle from the acquisition but the profit they *won't* lose by not acquiring them.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#315
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anti-zionism != anti-semitism learn your definition

The difference doesn't matter for the purpose of this thread. The comment was crude, inappropriate, and unnecessarily political.

Yes it does. If they were founded by former Russian or Chinese intel you would hear the same thing.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#316
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

WTF does that mean?

Presumably it's a reference to the fact several of the founders are Unit 8200 alumni, which is part of Israeli intelligence. It's not the same as Mossad, though.

As I understand it, Unit 8200 is the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, and Mossad is their CIA.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#317
post #256

> Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors > Wiz agreed to acquire Tel Aviv-based Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, for $50 million in December 2023. In April 2024, the company acquired cloud detection and response startup, Gem Security, for around $350 million > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy…

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> Everyone here saying they've used Wiz for years are huge liars.

I have seen Wiz at AWS re:Invent multiple years in a row, and have seen their product used to good success in multiple companies I've worked with. It's not vaporware, it's a real product that really works and has a place in the cloud/container security space. I don't think anyone is lying here at all. The fact it's /also/ an acquisition vehicle as a path to an exit for the founders is a separate thing.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#318
This deal isn't about security, it's about data.

Google already have one of the best security teams in the industry - Project Zero [0]. They don't need Wiz's "enterprise" expertise for security.

This deal is about DATA. Wiz, as a cybersecurity vendor, have full remote access to their customers cloud compute storage (EC2 EBS volumes, etc) in the name of "security scanning" - this is actually part of their unique selling point - "agent-less scanning" which is unlike traditional security tools that require an agent installed in the OS. Instead, Wiz is able to just clone your full data volume and scan it locally in their cloud accounts/VPC.

With this deal Google has bought a ton of confidential data from Wiz's customers without their explicit knowledge or approval, and they will use it to improve Google's AI models like Gemini and probably several other products.

A year ago Google struck a $60M/yr deal with Reddit to exclusively license their content [1] for the same reason, and that data is probably much smaller and less valuable than the data Wiz has access to from their customers, which include companies like Morgan Stanley, DocuSign, Slack, Plaid, and others. [2]

Sources:

0: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com

1: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...

2: https://www.wiz.io/customers

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#319
post #256

> Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors > Wiz agreed to acquire Tel Aviv-based Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, for $50 million in December 2023. In April 2024, the company acquired cloud detection and response startup, Gem Security, for around $350 million > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy…

These companies are the closest you can get to a legal mafia, they are effectively charging companies around the world to keep them "safe". In other words, a job that is traditionally considered to be a basic service of the government is now being privatized by people that nobody knows if we can really trust.

This is an absurd take. There’s nothing stopping anyone from building their own cloud security tools (many have), and unlike the Mafia, Wiz isn’t threatening anyone who doesn’t buy their service. I’m also not aware of any government agency providing any reasonable analog to what these tools provide in the physical world.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#320

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.

> They also snapshot your disks, cloning them to Wiz accounts

I can see how that could be worth $32B.

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