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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

reuters.com

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#831

Post by twakefield »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #820

Extracting this from my comment on a subthread to add color to the discussion here. They announced in a blog post that they went from $1m ARR to $100m ARR in 18 months (Feb 2021 -> July 2022). [1] Reuters in the article posted here reports they were at $500m ARR when they last raised in mid-2024, meaning they went from $100m to $500m in around 2 years. One would thus speculate they are likely a few hundred million ab…

> particularly given it's all-cash, which Google doesn't even have

GOOG's latest balance sheet showed $96B in cash.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#832

Post by weatherlite »

cess11 wrote: post #794
weatherlite wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The palestinians do not have the capability to do "extreme violence", they just don't have the materials and tools and suppliers needed, because they suffer under occupation or in refugee camps. They did. They used that capacity to kill as many people as they could - they reached around 1200 people (+ 250 more kidnapped - many of whom died later) which is not a lack of capacity, and then the war started. Now they h…

Those numbers are pathetic compared to the suffering caused by the israeli occupation of palestinians. The palestinian armed groups had a lot more weaponry than they brought along on October 7th, in an operation that was explicitly aimed at military personnel and bases, as detailed in the israeli report published a while back. They concluded for example that the palestinians in the unorganised second wave arrived at…

> Those numbers are pathetic compared to the suffering caused by the israeli occupation of palestinians

The Gaza numbers are pathetic compared to the Vietnam war and the Vietnam war was nothing compared to the Holocaust. Let's keep deteriorating this debate I'm loving it.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#833

Post by guappa »

IshKebab wrote: post #109
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #87

I'm marginally in the IT space... Is there anything to my reaction that at least in dollar terms this is a multiple of the dollar amount of what Whatsapp was acquired back in the day, which was a large consumer facing product that I could see was quite literally taking over messaging all over the world, and this is a... platform I've never heard of? I'm just trying to make sense of the numbers.

True, but the vast majority of people spend zero money on WhatsApp. I actually have no idea how I would give them money. There are no adverts, the metadata is not valuable, and no companies even use WhatsApp business, at least in the UK. Their UK revenue is basically 0, despite 100% market share. This is an enterprise product in a space where companies spend millions of dollars. Still seems like an insane amount thou…

Like for whatsapp, they're buying the database, not the product.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#834

Post by stdclass »

CokeFaultSoyuz wrote: post #748
DeathArrow wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Adallom was founded in 2012 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, who are former members of the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200 and alumni of the Talpiot program. It's interesting that many people working in intelligence found ways to become very successful in business. I wonder what is the reason.

Blackmail

well you might get downvoted, but its still true, just look what Robert Maxwell did with the PROMIS software. That was also coincidentally Mossad.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#835

Post by guappa »

IshKebab wrote: post #232
quantumwannabe wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp when it was acquired cost $1/year (with a year long free trial) and had a billion users and 55 employees. They were printing money.

As far as I remember they didn't ever really collect that money though. I certainly never paid it. I'm not sure they ever even implemented payment on Android. Obviously hard to source this old stuff but I found an old Reddit comment that backs up my recollection: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsapp/comments/xesw29/comment/io...

They were collecting. Everyone I knew was paying.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#836

Post by guappa »

atemerev wrote: post #259
dataflow wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea what profitable things they do with that data?

Mostly ad targeting (you can infer a lot of things from the global graph of contacts). Meta is an attention routing company.

How do they spend insane amount of money in targeted ads and all the ads I get are useless?

I constantly get ads to learn how to code. Ok I've been doing that professionally for over a decade and I have a real degree from a real university… why would I do some online programming course?

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#837

Post by wglb »

ryanSrich wrote: post #724
tptacek wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of Wiz, but would have had a hard time listing out their feature/benefit statement, because I don't work with CSPM tools. I don't think this "I have doubts about what you actually do" line is doing the work you want it to; it may be backfiring on you a bit.

CNAPPs and CSPMs are extremely common tools in cybersecurity. This is my concern. If you're in cyber and don't have knowledge of these things you're either in something insanely niche, in research of some sort, or lack critical knowledge that you should have. There's a big responsibility as a security practitioner to stay up to date on new tools and techniques. CNAPP and CSPM is not some new thing that was invented l…

> . If you're in cyber and don't have knowledge of these things you're either in something insanely niche, in research of some sort, or lack critical knowledge that you should have

Here are some things that counter this:

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/Ptacek-N...: A paper that rocked the security industry at the time.

Tptacek also was cofounder of Matasano, now part of NCC; also cofounder of Latacora.

More info: https://sockpuppet.org/me/

Also the co-author of https://cryptopals.com/, https://microcorruption.com/login.

The author of https://www.latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right..., https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/, https://sockpuppet.org/stuff/dnssec-qa.html,

These are about what I call hard-core security, hardly insanely niche, and hardly lacking critical knowledge.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#838

Post by [deleted] »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #830
ryanSrich wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in security and you haven't at least heard of Wiz, I have doubts about what you actually do. I'm not saying you have to be a CSPM expert, but not even hearing about Wiz, when they are the largest CSPM, is somewhat concerning.

I've been securing my cloud instances the same way I would for dedicated hardware. I use the same tools. I periodically eyeball usage data from the service providers to make sure their end is OK. Takes 5-15 minutes. Occasionally run updates. It all mostly just keeps chugging along. What is a CSPM? Some cloud monitoring tool? What does it provide over open-source security and monitoring tools with years of field use t…

[deleted]

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#840

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #530
1oooqooq wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most people here are also in security and still haven't heard. It's more likely backroom kickbacks (and/or mossad) than invisible unicorn.

Security is a big field. I’m in the CSPM space and Wiz is a major player here, I actually had a bit of an existential crisis about what we were building when I first saw a demo of their platform. Most of their competitors, like Palo Alto, have a very convoluted offering from gluing together several acquisitions. Wiz is very cohesive with a much nicer API and great UX, which is very underrated in the security space im…

> Wiz is very cohesive with a much nicer API and great UX

I actually don't care for Wiz's UX.

If you're a manager and just want to get an idea of what your security posture looks like, it's great. They have a million dashboards for you.

But if you're an AppSec Engineer that just wants to see which EC2 instances have which CVEs, it's kind of a pain in the pass and takes way too many clicks.

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