$32B for an entity with 500M in ARR? What the blazes are they paying for?
Google to buy Wiz for $32B
851–860 of 951 posts
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mossad aren't the guys doing cyber ops in Israel. They're suave arsim (how else can you blend in Beirut or Tehran). Also, if you've worked with Israeli government cybersecurity teams, they aren't much different in caliber from the kind you'd find at the NSA, GCHQ, or Netherlands.
Unit 8200 is cyber ops and the main people of this company are all from that unit. https://undercodenews.com/from-idf-intelligence-to-a-2b-goog... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200
There are a couple other units beyond 8200.
A lot of the 8200 hype is just hype though, because Gili Ranaan and Shlomo Kramer became billionaires earlier than alumni from the other cyber units.
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#853Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wiz is a recognized leader in the CNAPP/DevSecOps market, and so they'd be naturally attractive to any cloud hyperscaler. Google had to either build or buy a similar solution to grow GCP; and they chose to buy. But $32B is an enormous hunk of cheddar, and I don't know why they felt compelled to pay that much. The ROI on such a large investment is unclear.
It gives them (legally debatable) visibility into how customers are using their competitions products. That's part of the reason it didn't happen under the Biden administration. Trump is very much against enforcing anti-competition laws though, so the deal suddenly began to make sense again.
Google would have to be contractually bound not to do that, or Wiz customers would flee like rats off a sinking ship, which would significantly devalue their investment.
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#854Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's quite the claim, can you provide an example? GCP is permissive out of the box and things like the Compute Engine service account having the basic Editor role by default is a bit of a footgun, but they're trivially turned off.
I'm afraid it's something I need to agree with. So many areas where resource-based conditions just do not work with particular GCP product offerings and you're forced to give out much broader access than you should be giving out. It's half-arsed and prevents you implementing PoLP. AWS has a steeper learning curve here, but I've never been unable to constrain down e.g. access to an SNS topic in the way I want to.
Feel like AWS is the opposite. It’s often a pain to go as granular as you can go.
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unit 8200 is cyber ops and the main people of this company are all from that unit. https://undercodenews.com/from-idf-intelligence-to-a-2b-goog... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200
There are a couple other units beyond 8200. A lot of the 8200 hype is just hype though, because Gili Ranaan and Shlomo Kramer became billionaires earlier than alumni from the other cyber units.
81 is other one I am familiar with but I believe they focus on OSINT
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#856Earlier quoted context omitted.
This thread is talking about Wiz . The comment you responded to was about the fact that security company founders often have intelligence community backgrounds and/or come from adversary states (from a US/European perspective.) It had nothing to do with VPN.
I can chose to what part of a comment I'll respond to. I responded to list of companies providing "VPN" software. Fortinet, paloalto/globalprotect, checkpoint,...
That is a tiny part of what those companies do and was mentioned nowhere in that post.
You’re responding to something that isn’t there.
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#857Insider baseball IMO.
100% -- many of these acquisitions don't start through the front door.
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#858Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you'd be so kind for those of us that haven't touched cloud in 5/10 years, what is Wiz? from reading the google announcement: solving the supply chain hybrid cloud security issues? I could google I know but you seem to know what you are talking about, so if you'd be so kind. :)
When you use a cloud provider to setup a VM, what policies do you apply to it in order to ensure it’s secure? Wiz and other tools in the same space tell you and tracks compliance across your fleet. Idk if wiz does this, but their competitors have “compliance packs” which are preset compliance patterns, IE hipaa, finra, etc. That way you click a button and it tells you every change you need to make to be compliant Edi…
You are telling me it’s a huge excel sheet with all my cloud resources (some colored red) in?
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#859What the hell is "Wiz"? Some nobody company that was formed G might be the modern day IBM. You would think G would have the brain power to compete and provide out of the box security for their own platform. I guess the MBA losers at the top have been shaving too much from engineering to do this properly. The acquisition hiring in big tech is wild to me. And the consolidation of power into a few companies continues.
> Some nobody company That was the fastest to $100m ARR in history > Some nobody company That was a Decacorn ~3yrs after its founding > Some nobody company With ~half of the Fortune 100 as paying customers. I get it - most people here aren’t in cybersecurity, nor do they understand the space, but let me put it this way - if you are looking for the top 5 cybersecurity companies by mindshare of people in the industry ,…
It doesn't hurt to be brib...incentivizing the F1000 CISOs (not my words, see article) : https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc
"The first sales come from the loyal CISOs who work with the fund. Although it may be considered "small money", the jumps between the first stages of fundraising are the most difficult. “Until a ‘regular’ startup company reaches sales of $2-10 million it grinds itself to a pulp, but with Gili Ra'anan, this happens in the first year of sales. He creates a mechanism that is difficult to compete against because his companies immediately jump to a valuation of $100-200 million, raise more money, and then also have more resources to compete later,” a partner in an Israeli venture capital fund tells Calcalist. “With a seemingly small purchase of $100,000-$200,000, a CISO increases a startup's value by dozens of times.”"
...
"I recruited a new CISO for a financial organization that I managed out of a desire to refresh the cyber defense system. I gave him a free hand because I trusted him and I see this position as a position of trust. Six months later, I noticed that, surprisingly, almost all of the new logos that the CISO introduced were portfolio companies of Cyberstarts [Of which Wiz is their most notable]," describes a former senior executive at a large financial institution in the U.S. "It's not that these were necessarily bad solutions, but that some of them were a very low priority for us or solved problems that were not particularly urgent. After I confronted the CISO on the subject, he admitted that he is on the list of advisers of Cyberstarts and receives a percentage of the funds from them. Shortly after this, he left the company and immediately upon the appointment of a new CISO, I asked him to inform me if he was contacted by Cyberstarts. Within a few weeks, he had already received an email from them with a description of their kind of 'loyalty program' that details exactly what he will receive the more he works with the fund."
Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B
#860Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google isn’t buying Wiz for “security expertise”, they’re buying Wiz for a security product, in a growth area, that customers absolutely love. You’ve provided no evidence for the conspiracy theory that google is buying Wiz to siphon up a bunch of data, and if you’re going to link to Wiz, maybe link to their public list of security certifications, many of which prohibit the type of data harvesting you are suggesting.…
I trust open source code I can see and compile and control. :) How is "trusting wiz" (trusting some icons on website controlled by wiz leading to publicly inaccessible reports, half of which are done by a single company somewhere in Florida) related to what Google might do with it after aquisition?
That’s great. For you. Most businesses don’t have the ability or desire to build every single security tool they use in-house or use open source for everything. So they buy commercial tools. Which are audited by third parties to give the companies that use the commercial tools some idea of how their data will be used.
If google wants to maintain those audit findings, which they’ll need to do to keep most of their customers, that’s going to limit the kind of data collection they can do. Unless, of course, you want to propose a new conspiracy theory (which I guess would be par for the course in this thread) that Google is going to lie to their auditors to get at that sweet, sweet data (most of which they already have for their GCP customers and don’t need to buy Wiz to obtain.)