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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

reuters.com

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#352
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.

I agree. The comment that equated an intelligence service with a religion was crude, inappropriate and unnecessarily political. It is downright shameful to invoke the very real phenomenon of religious persecution as a way to discourage mere mention of a specific, relatively small intelligence organization.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#353
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In a number of cases, yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#354

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 selli…

> They don't need Wiz's "enterprise" expertise for security.

Yes, because exploit discovery is exactly what enterprise security is.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#355
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figures. Crazy how badly I midsized this problem. When I was working on a cloud provider I suspected this would be a big problem space for building in, but I thought it was in the low billions, I was thinking (I guess stupidly) that the clouds and tools around them would be kind enough to create a lot of standardization so as at least this stuff wasn't junk. I get wanting to create a bit of friction, but thought "thi…

Idk about other clouds, but Google didn’t eat their own cloud dog food when I was there. We had people food (borg) that was kinda impossible to separate from the infrastructure of google3 (and Google dev processes) and so cloud was built different. It wouldn’t surprise me if that organization just had no awareness of how bad the friction really was for long enough for Wiz to get really good at it?

I'm not at Google, but the usual thinking is that the public product fixed a lot of the design warts of the internal one, but it's only 90% feature compatible, and the internal migration has an opportunity cost that's higher than the cost of maintaining two similar products.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#356

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 selli…

I find it hard to believe (or maybe I don’t want to believe) that this could ever happen? Even if Wiz has T&C’s that allow full access to clients’ data, and even if the T&C allow some sort of “use” of that data that includes training an LLM, surely you can’t release an AI trained on private information to the public? You can’t have Gemini spitting out internal/private/confidential information?

Am I just naive?

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#357
post #342

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 selli…

Project Zero and Wiz and have very little in common. It's wrong to bring these two up together as if they are comparable. Project Zero focuses on discovering and analysis of new (including zero-day) vulnerabilities. I do not believe Wiz uncovers new vulnerabilities. The skillset of someone working on Project Zero looks very different from someone working on Wiz. The field of security is huge. It's unhelpful to lump u…

> I do not believe Wiz uncovers new vulnerabilities

Oh they do. https://www.wiz.io/blog/tag/research

A few fun ones are the multiple cross-tenant security exploits they found in Azure (which is why, among the tons of other reasons, Azure is just the worst possible choice for a cloud vendor from the big 3 - their security is a joke, and none of the vulnerabilities below should have passed even a cursory security review, but they did, which means the whole org doesn't take security seriously. Add in the fact that it's slow as hell, and has the UX worthy of an Enterprise vendor, the only reason to choose it is because you're getting a good deal on the golf course for it):

https://www.wiz.io/blog/azure-active-directory-bing-misconfi...

https://www.wiz.io/blog/omigod-critical-vulnerabilities-in-o...

https://www.wiz.io/blog/secret-agent-exposes-azure-customers...

https://www.wiz.io/blog/chaosdb-how-we-hacked-thousands-of-a...

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#358

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 selli…

This is an incredibly stupid take on the deal.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#359
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying this as if the founder is a normal civilian. The guy served in unit 8200 and 81 around the beginning of the 2000s(Second Intifada, first g a z a war, if not more), and overstayed his mandatory service. This isn't a normal company, just like every Israeli security "startup" with founders coming from idf intelligence units. Even ignoring this, 32b for such a company just doesn't make sense.

In Israel, a "normal civilian" sees the Sde Teiman video and thinks "those soldiers are heroes".

I don't know if it's true but I do know for sure America has killed at least 100x more civilians than Israel has in wars that were in no way needed or existential (Vietnam, Iraq x2) and yet no one on his right mind would demonize ordinary Americans and imply they are all bloodthirsty Nazis to be persecuted everywhere they step on earth.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#360

This seems like a silly and ridiculous acquisition. Surely for $32 billion almost any security technology could be replicated? You could hire several thousand best in class engineers and build whatever Wiz has in house… buying this almost makes it seem like Google has no idea how to build new innovative products, which I guess a lot of people already think. For Instagram and WhatsApp it was the user base and growth t…

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