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Comment by czk | Hacker News Reader

> 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 Reznik, and Ami Luttwak, all of whom previously founded Adallom.

> 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.

> Adallom was reportedly acquired by Microsoft for $320 million in July 2015

> On March 18, 2025, Google announced an all-cash acquisition of Wiz for $32 billion

Had never heard of Wiz until they posted the blog post about the DeepSeek database being public earlier this year.

https://www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-research-uncovers-exposed-deepse...

View on HN

I never heard of them until they were purchased for $32 billion.

Thats the kind of a company everyone wants to build in enterprise security.

Incognito unicorns.

There are many companies like these in security space. Another company I can think of is Rubrik. All these large security companies under the radar success.

most people here are also in security and still haven't heard.

It's more likely backroom kickbacks (and/or mossad) than invisible unicorn.

kickbacks, may be. I have seen the product. It is not so mossad-y. It fairly straight forward cloud, VM, kubernetes scans.

Does it protect stuff? Somewhat.

Is it the best product out there - no.

Are CISOs happy? CSPM is mostly a checklist item in their bucket to things to do.

It depends on what kind of security you are working in. Most of the people in CSPM, CNAPP world have heard their name.

It is product built for cloud security/devsecops folks.

> It is not so mossad-y.

Would we (i.e. anyone not in the intelligence space) know how intelligence service-y software would look like ? . Aren't all such organizations trained and designed to be inconspicuous and in places we are unlikely to expect.

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.

> they aren't much different .. NSA, GCHQ, or Netherlands

I (and most here) wouldn't really know what that caliber is in these other organizations either to compare

What we do hear is of how the Hubble's tech stack is hand me down previous gen(i.e. 70s) spy satellites or exploits like Stuxnet, Pegasus or the recent pager supply chain attacks. On pure technical level those are all pretty impressive things well beyond what I or even anyone I may personally know do.

There of course is definitely certain amount of propaganda that would project much higher capability than reality, being mindful of that misdirection and the visible evidence, we civilians can only reasonably conclude that we will never have a clue what these organizations can or cannot actually do.

> They're suave arsim (how else can you blend in Beirut or Tehran).

To save others looking up what 'suave arsim' meant:

1. suave -- a normal English the word for charming/confident

2. "arsim" [1] -- apparently a former ethnic slur for Mizrahi Jews [2] now repurposed to mean crude, loud and brash (which sound to me like the equivalent of the British slang term 'chav').

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_(slang)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews

It was a bad attempt at humor, but pretty much my point is there are a couple other cybersecurity/sigint specific units unrelated to Mossad. And "arsim" isn't as loaded a term anymore - everyone is mixed in Israel now because it's a melting pot.

And saying "Mossad"-this/"Mossad"-that just feels like it's increasingly being used as a dogwhistle.

I mean, it is used as a substitution for 'Israel', but I don't see how that's a dogwhistle. Or do you mean antisemitic?

I think you just watched Asi Cohen skit https://youtu.be/bN-en_7KGT8?si=xqhHaa9lBXpjntEq

I actually didn't see this before, but that is absolute gold - Asi Cohen is a national treasure (and absolutely a suave arsim XD)

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

We would actually. Lot of the intelligence orgs. use COTS these days.

Ghidra from the NSA at a glance looks and feels like normal software.

AquaSec is built by an Isreali company and looks and feels much like any other SaaS product.

100% the case

If a security firm could blackmail Google, what would that look like?

What could possibly be worth 36 billion? That we don't already know?

This is google. They've got everything. I use google password manager, wallet, biometrics to log into my google smartphone and google authenticator for my 2FA. I use google voice and maps, photos, youtube, search, docs, gmail and gemini for AI.

Imagine if you found an authentication backdoor - a way to impersonate any account and you could start sucking down data. You do it for 5 billion people and charged google $6.40 per person not to put it on Tor.

$32 billion would be a steal.

Do you think you could get away with doing that?

If you have alumni at senior positions internally, it shouldn't be that hard to strike a deal.

Old but relevant - https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/01/revealed-the-former-israel...

For $32 billion?

It's cheaper to, well, you know.

Bingo, a huge kickback to some "invisible" hands. They're probably already creating the new "unicorn" to sell to another FAANG company.

> most people here are also in security

No they aren't.

I've been a cybersecurity SWE, PM, and VC for a decade at this point and I've almost never found any relevant security or enterprise SaaS related content on HN.

For a hot second (around 2018-2019) there was solid conversations around eBPF, io_uring, or cloud posture management, but that doesn't happen on here anymore.

Same with MLOps and ML Infra as well - almost no one on here understands Infiniband, RDMA, or BLAS

The tech industry is MASSIVE - and most people are only clued into their own little niche. And according to HN, the only tech companies that exist are FAANG, Nvidia, Tesla, TSMC, and BYD.

I vaguely remember this hot second you refer to. What is the HN equivalent where those conversations are happening today?

Lobste.rs for technical stuff. But most security related conversations by security SMEs aren't happening online anymore. We have specific user conferences and regional user groups now.

Cool, any in central Louisiana? Poland? That'll teach the AI!

The cybersecurity industry is almost entirely located in the Bay, Seattle, Tel Aviv, and Blr/Hyd, so the really active user groups are mostly in those cities.

Cybersecurity goes hand-in-hand with IT, DBA, Networking, DevOps, and OS/Systems Programming - all functions that were previously looked down upon over the last 15-20 years.

Furthermore, most American CS programs made OS internals, Computer Architecture, or Distributed Systems optional, so the junior portion of the ecosystem doesn't exist in the US anymore.

I don't use Lobste.rs anymore because the owner irrationally blocked the browser I'm using, and I refuse to switch to a different browser just to read Lobste.rs. The owner seems like he has some issues to say the least.

i don't consider installing yet another 3rd party keys on my 3rd party cloud vnet as adding security... but maybe that's just me.

Well, it depends what it does to your liability. If, in case of attack, it ends up shifting the blame to a third party, then yes, that's considered adding security in enterprise space.

>I've been a cybersecurity SWE, PM, and VC for a decade at this point and I've almost never found any relevant security or enterprise SaaS related content on HN.

FWIW "here" could mean "in this thread". It's pretty normal (and very visible here) that threads about X attract people working in X. I'm not sure this is happening here, I work in IT security but I clicked the thread because 32B caught my eye.

Exactly, parent commenter is excercising the same bias they’re accusing others of. Rookie move imo.

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 imo.

I have zero trust in Google’s promise to keep supporting the tool for multiple clouds or maintain the high quality of product design that makes Wiz great. It’s great for my job security, but I’d call it a net loss for the industry.

CSPM is very crowded space. There are quite some new and emerging providers. Wiz out of the scene opens up new opportunities.

Opportunity for opportunity sake isn't a virtue if it gets rid of one of the few providers that was any good.

> 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.

How would you like to consume that information?

I like the way InsightVM does it.

There's a single button I click that'll list all my VMs, then a single click (usually a middle click to open a new tab) to view all the CVEs in each VM.

> and takes way too many clicks.

That is the space

The performance matters much less than the UI

And the UI sucks because if you know what your doing you can type a command

But the people who write the cheques do not know that, and equate UI with GUI

So we get Azure (where I found this)

Squinting mousing and clicking a dozen times to do the equivalent of one rsync command....

How does Wiz work? What is the ELI 5 or tldr?

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.

> If you're in security and you haven't at least heard of Wiz, I have doubts about what you actually do.

IT security a very wide field. For example, a lot of positions in IT security are actually about compliance (i.e. lots of documentation), and ensuring the rollout of all necessary application patches in the whole company.

Compliance and patch/vulnerability management teams are a major constituency for CSPM tools.

I know diabetologists in India who didn't hear about Ozempic till late 2024.

Sometimes the simpler explanation is the correct one.

I am in security for many years now, my main focus is reverse engineering (but I did many diverse things, including cryptography, some exploit development and the opposite, AV work, I did R&D in security automation and some development of security tools and engines).

I never even looked at a CSPM, and from my point of view[1] CSPMs are a tool only relevant for a small part of security teams focused on enterprise cloud security. Today is the first time I heard of Wiz.

edit Actually my partner works in policy/compliance/legal side of security, and I'm pretty sure she never heard of Wiz too.

[1] I wrote this only to stress how different people in the same field can see things differently.

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 last year. It's been around for a decade.

You might want to google the person you’re arguing with

One of those beautiful HN moments where just clicking the profile link would have helped them shift from such an authoritative tone.

CSPM solutions are what corporate buys when they don't want to invest in security. It is rubber-stamping and ass covering. From my experience most people involved with such platforms are rather technical sales people than actual security experts.

I’ve never heard or seen either of those terms before reading this thread. What you’re calling “CNAPP” I’ve been calling “endpoint security”. I’ve been building internal “CSPM” tooling since 2014 with like raw cloud api calls feeding into graphviz, CI-like tests in a terraform repo, transforming the state of a set of cloud accounts into a form I can shove into z3 and ask questions about, that kind of thing, but never heard it called that.

I suppose if your company prefers to build over buy, you won’t be exposed to the kind of knowledge and vocabulary that buyers in the space use to orient themselves.

> . 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.

Bullshit. Infosec is not just about highly inflated startups or whatever the fuck CSPM means. I know people who do exploit dev, reverse engineering, blue teaming and they have never heard of wiz. Stop overexaggerating

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 that would make me invest time into it? Also, have these tools been thoroughly audited, scanned, fuzzed, and pentested by reputable people like some of the open source tools we've been using? Since tools are part of the attack surface, do these tools themselves increase or reduce it?

Serious questions since you think I should be very knowledgeable about these tools. My tech stack just works with minimal maintenance. So, I'd have to lose time on more important or fun stuff to even study CSPM or Wiz. Not counting setting it up.

Two things:

1.) Most people here are likely not in security.

2.) I’m only adjacent to security but have heard of Wiz. If you work in security and haven’t, are you sure you’re good enough to subject us to your opinion?

>2.) I’m only adjacent to security but have heard of Wiz. If you work in security and haven’t, are you sure you’re good enough to subject us to your opinion?

For some reason I picked this hill to die on in this thread. I work in IT security for a long time, and I have never heard of Wiz. My focus is malware reverse engineering and adjacent subfields. I have no interest in anything Cloud.

"are you sure you’re good enough to subject us to your opinion" feels a bit dismissive.

Ya, Mossad's primary task is enterprise sales for Israeli tech.

That is totally unfounded. Their book of business is huge. You think Google is paying 32B of shareholder dollars because of a foreign intelligence agency? Keep your conspiracism to yourself.

Wiz is a private company but the street's assumption is $1B/ARR over the next year or so.

HN is not the entire industry. Not even close. It’s a small subset.

The article talks about Trump inserting himself into larger deals, there is no reason to think this one is an exception.

I’d also bet on this being more of a kickback, rather than an invisible unicorn. Between a visible elephant (Trump/Israel) and an invisible unicorn, betting on an elephant is more reasonable.

Rubrik had pretty bad breaches in the past:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/rubrik-rotate...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/rubrik-confir...

This one is straight up embarrassing:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/rubrik-data-leak/

> The exposed server wasn’t protected with a password, allowing access to anyone who knew where to find the server.

So much about "zero trust", at this point it's nothing but a marketing term and has lost it's true meaning

$350M ARR in less than 5 years. Aiming towards $1B by the end of 2025.

You never heard of them since perhaps your decisions were not in the cycles of their product. Those who are , heard indeed (type of folks who look at Gartner magic quadrants).

You didn't hear about them last time on HN, when it was $23 billion?

My company just started using them and I was part of the due dilligence evaluation of their product. I had never been so impressed with a cloud security provider before I started using their product. Absolutely phenomenal product offering l.

This is wild to me. As someone in security, Wiz is definitely one of the whales.

Same here, I guess it's the circles you run. I just went to their homepage and I have no idea what they do. I already have CI/CD, code, etc.. "securing" it seems like, use aws secret stores?

In other words, their webpage is not telling me anything. Companies like these, always feel like instead of having a useful product, they hired useful networks of people to "spread the word" and sell sell sell to your network. Apparently I wasn't in the network. Sorry old and salty.

As a meaningful tangent, how many layers of obscurity do you use to keep sales people from contacting you?

If you do interesting work, you’ll get cold emails unless you take steps to avoid them.

Companies have problems securing their workloads. Not just storing secrets. Off the top of my head, I've personally been able to centralize the following with a single tool (instead of gluing together a dozen different providers)

- scan cloud configurations for policy violations - detect and remediate infrastructure misconfigurations - real-time visibility into cloud resource inventories - early detection of issues - container vuln. scanning - runtime anomalous behavior - alerts and correlate security events - compliance mappings - id risky permissions in IAM policies - track changes and configuration drift over time - implement zero-trust policies across microservices - eforce network seg in containerized environments - run security checks during build and deploy stages - vulnerability assessments on running VMs and containers - policy-as-code for consistent security standards

It's a whale, but a young whale.

Wiz has only been around for 5-years.

In your opinion, are they a whale because they make a great product... or just have a great marketing/PR/sales team? I am guessing "great product" because I cannot believe that Google cannot just rebuild it themselves (if not a great product).

Wiz is widely considered one of the strongest CNAPP/CSPM products on the market. I haven’t personally tested every single competitor’s solution, but I’ve found Wiz to outperform pan, crowdstrike, and prisma.

To answer your question. Google doesn't acquire Wis because Google can’t build a comparable product themselves. The real driver is that Wiz has already achieved market penetration and trust. Replicating that from scratch would be a massive undertaking, requiring not just a sophisticated product but also the brand credibility, customer relationships, and reputation for reliability. establishing that level of traction and trust is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. I highly doubt Google would try to build a direct competitor from the ground up when acquiring Wiz allows them to leverage its existing success right away.

I highly doubt Google would be capable of building something like this from the ground up. Just take a look at one of their recent efforts Stadia.

The product is great. We’re using it since 2023. Very happy.

Regarding your google comment: Google builds Google products that can also be used by other people. I am pretty confident they cannot build something like Wiz. And not because they don’t have researchers and developers.

It does not make sense. In 2024 Wiz had 10.7% market share. Revenue in the 1,5 to 1,7 Billion but they were not profitable in 2023. Become profitable in 2024 meaning costs are very high.

Also looks like Google is desperate for growth in Cloud and they need to do something.

They are paying as much money as their whole Google Cloud revenue in 2023. Revenue multiple is like 40x times revenue for Wiz. Exceptionally high, even for a high-growth company. Clearly overpaying.

Wiz had nine rounds so massive dilution, and VCs need to recover the money...

10% market share in security is huge. It is an extremely fragmented market, across almost all product segments.

10% market share in any industry with an even slightly healthy level of competition is huge. The fact that people think it's not for tech feels like an indictment of the overall health of the industry to me.

Perhaps I should have been clearer, but especially compared to the rest of the enterprise tech market, security is unusually fragmented. There is no Microsoft or Cisco of the security market in the way those companies dominate the desktop operating system and core networking markets, respectively.

Analysts sometimes refer to the enterprise networking market as "Cisco and the Seven Dwarves". Nobody has ever said that about Symantec (prior to the Broadcom acquisition) or Palo Alto Networks.

It is often the case that in a new security product category, the products are so different, it is hard to collect them together in a single category with a straight face. Example: next generation AV circa 2015-2016. AV was a well-worn product category. All of the legacy products did basically the same thing. More or less at the same time, a bunch of new products came to market that all claimed the mantle of "next generation AV:"

* Bit9 did process whitelisting, later adding Carbon Black for endpoint forensics

* Fire Eye had a proto-EDR solution

* Cylance did ML-based malware detection

* Palo Alto Networks had an exploit-mitigation focused agent that they bolted ML-based malware detection onto.

The industry slowly converged on EDR as the sort-of successor to endpoint AV budgets.

A few years later, the cloud security space was the same fragmented mess. Some were what we now know as CSPM, some were glorified DLP solutions, some container security solutions, etc.

Microsoft is the Microsoft of the enterprise security market, more or less. They completely dominate email, largely dominate identity, have a plurality if not a majority on endpoint, but don't compete in network.

> The industry slowly converged on EDR as the sort-of successor to endpoint AV budgets.

This was a dedicated effort by CrowdStrike working with analysts back in 2017-2018. EDR capabilities themselves, interestingly, grew out of forensics companies like Guidance Software. HBGary and Mandiant were the early players. FireEye killed Mandiant's EDR off, but HBGary's lives on to some extent today, two or three acquisitions later, at GoSecure.

> Microsoft is the Microsoft of the enterprise security market, more or less. They completely dominate email, largely dominate identity, have a plurality if not a majority on endpoint, but don't compete in network.

The most recent figures I’ve seen are that Microsoft has around 25% of the endpoint market[0], which is a plurality because the market is so fragmented. Proofpoint claims around 24% of the email security market[1].

The only security market you can say they “dominate” is identity, if you ignore the MFA market. AD is, at least, almost everywhere.

> This was a dedicated effort by CrowdStrike working with analysts back in 2017-2018.

That’s one interpretation of events. It’s also completely orthogonal to what I wrote.

0 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2024/08/21/mic...

1 - https://www.proofpoint.com/us/blog/email-and-cloud-threats/p...

> Proofpoint claims around 24% of the email security market

Proofpoint is the clear number two, but Microsoft always sits behind Proofpoint (and Mimecast, IronPort, etc.). They're also always in front of Abnormal and other API-only options. Every big company has E5 with Defender for Office 365 on their email, and the rest either still have E5 or they have EOP.

> That’s one interpretation of events.

In 2017 EPP and EDR were distinct categories, and CrowdStrike had a big internal initiative (driven top-down by Kurtz, but managed by a PM director under Rod Murchison) to merge them, while Cylance and others that had separate SKUs for each area worked to keep them apart. CrowdStrike was more effective.

I mentioned this because it wasn't just a natural market convergence; B2B companies spend absurd amounts of money with the Gartners and Forresters of the world to align their products with line items in budgets. It's capitalism all the way down.

Not speculating on anything here. I was at or worked closely with all of the companies mentioned in both posts.

You like to make absolute statements like “always”, but I know of large organizations (Fortune 500) that use Proofpoint, but not Microsoft email security. And in endpoint, there are shops that license defender as part of an EA, but don’t use it - of course, those seats go into the Forrester figures that Microsoft likes to tout.

Sure, I can enumerate the handful of the Fortune 500 that don't use Microsoft. Palo Alto Networks, for example, has TAP sitting in front of Google. In PANW's case it's because of a broader partnership Nikesh put together with Google in 2018, which also involved moving from AWS to GCP. This is stupendously uncommon, though.

If you were to look through the System -> Inbound Mail settings for every PPS customer, you'd find a sea of x.mail.protection.outlook.com, some on-prem Exchange servers, and practically nothing else. I'm comfortable with "always" as a description of this state of affairs, but you do you.

10% market share of a niche part of the CSPM market

>It does not make sense

actually, it makes perfect sense. it's just that you (and I) don't have the right perspective.

these giantcos are sitting on Himalayan ranges worth of cash, which is burning a fiery hole in their butts, and they don't know what to do with it.

and they have more cash than sense, even though they always brag about having some of the smartest people in the world, and also have FOMO (to competitors and upstarts).

Facebook buying WhatsApp for 19 billion did not make sense to us laymen either, but it happened.

I was flabbergasted when I read about it. ignorant me.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayas

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

go figure (pun intended)

edit: you answered your own doubt about why does not make sense:

>Also looks like Google is desperate for growth in Cloud and they need to do something.

that's what I said, FOMO.

man, if i sold even one of my software products for even a zillionth of such amounts, I would be on Mount Kailash (cloud 9 to you :)

grrr. envy emoji here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Kailash

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kailasha

>that's what I said, FOMO.

wow, faaak. I wrote my above comment off the cuff, although based on my intuition and common sense, but just now thought of googling FOMO, to check what Wikipedia says about it, and it seems they agree with me:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

relevant excerpt, from near the top of the above page (emphasis mine):

>FOMO can also affect businesses. Hype and trends can lead business leaders to invest based on perceptions of what others are doing, rather than their own business strategy.[19] This is also the idea of the bandwagon effect, where one individual may see another person or people do something and they begin to think it must be important because everyone is doing it. They might not even understand the meaning behind it, and they may not totally agree with it. Nevertheless, they are still going to participate because they don't want to be left out.[20]

leaders, huh? more like followers, aka sheep. include me out.

In cash!

I read their website and there must be something secret they've got cooking behind the scenes cause the valuation makes zero sense to me.

The whole thing reads like all the dozen or so "cloud security" plays out there.

Either I'm missing something big, or their products are outrageously far ahead of all the other similar sounding products out there.

I've been known to roll my eyes at a lot of these sorts of product catalogues in the past though and so I'm definitely biased and not the target audience for their marketing.

Some CIO out there probably really does think that their security problems will finally be over once they purchase another half dozen dashboards click through and look at.

>Either I'm missing something big,

I mean, their revenue? They're apparently on track to do a billion this year, growing pretty fast, so 30 billion seems fair enough.

Yeah, the website is not very helpful.

The product though is easy to set up, no friction - like 5 minutes per tenant; and in a few hours you have a really good picture of your security posture with very detailed explanations for every finding.

And the graph… very useful to understand why a finding is marked as high ir critical even though at first glance it does not look like it.

IMHO you are missing something big...

For Google they are worth 32B, they ARE the Google Security business from now on. They don't even have to be profitable themselves, having this aspect working means google get access to additional enterprise clients and in place they weren't previously present.

We use them and the product is very very nice and very lightweight to set up. Like for a cloud environment it takes about 5 minutes to get it up and running for a tenant.

They add features weekly or faster.

Just curious, what problem do I need to have that they'll solve for me?

No problem in particular.

What we use it for: - vulnerability assessments for containers and VMs (they give a list of vulnerable or outdated packages) - initial access vulnerabilities: what happens if an internet facing component is compromised because you have a vulnerable package and to what kind of data it has access to (it has some regexes and what not to figure out if in your database you have PII data, HIPAA etc.), what lateral movement is possible etc. - provides information on what you can do to fix a finding - IAM checks for overly broad permissions - Service account age and overdue key rotations

Take your pick.

I am hearing for first time, I thought Google is buying Wix the website builder and was thinking why!

Guess what is common between Wix and Wiz....

Wiy?

8200

What a strange shorthand. 73

8200 is an Israeli spy agency, whose alumni turn up in security companies almost as often as CIA alumni turns up in US newsrooms.

Thank you, didn't know about this rabbit hole.

The wikipedia page has a handy list of companies to avoid at all costs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200

https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/28/

Yea, good luck with that, especially when 8200 alumni are embedded deeply in the vast R&D sites all major US tech giants have in Israel (Apple alone employs thousands in Israel), whether by direct recruitment or by buying Israelis startups.

It stands for 8 smart people that run it and 200 clueless children that have no idea how the world works. Maybe it's the other way around, I can't tell.

I feel like the other commenters whooshed here.

>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.

Intelligence communities tend to pick very smart people who are particularly good at acquiring niche skills and operating under extreme situational uncertainty. I think those are valuable attributes for someone in business.

It surely must be exactly that.

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.

Military service in Israel is mandatory and the conscription rate in the core "educated" areas is ~90%. Each year, the intelligence corps then gets what is practically* first pick of the best minds of that year (typically kids who are already skilled in programing). They then get to have them for 4-6 years meaning unlike modern employers, they have time and motivation to invest in training them. Then you get the most apt programming minds of a generation spending six years together learning and building connections with each other in core programming and security skills.

Imagine if all the ivy league graduates in the US would be forced to work together for the same company, for free, for 4-6 years. Would you be surprised if suddenly former employees of that company found ways to become very successful in business?

* - Technically they get something like 3rd pick and there's negotiations and it depends on what sort of roles are involved etc. In practice, conscripts have some influence on where they'll go and if you have a choice in any role in the military, you are going to pick "write code in an air-conditioned office" over any other available option.

Tight networks largely. THey've invested heavily into having these "assets" in US tech companies, and so pro-Israel folks in the US work hard to acquire them in.

See [1] to see the flow of people. I explain the connections a lot in [2], and [3] is our initiative to work on it.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DAYsSPxpHFP/?img_index=1

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxvaembyMcQ&list=PLjHqnRFDnc...

[3] https://www.ethics.vc/get-involved

Network

Looks like a payoff to me.

I swear some tech company acquisitions appear like more expensive art purchases for for when you need to launder larger amounts of money...

You are on to something. It is a company of the chosen.

When I read the headline, I assumed the IoT platform and smart light brand, the now Wi-Fi arm of Signify, the smart home people who do (Philips) Hue smart lighting.

https://www.wizconnected.com/en-gb

This is the logo I envision in my head when hearing Wiz.

Didn’t Palo Alto Networks come out of 8200 too?

The primary founder (Nir Zuk) is a Unit 8200 alumni, as are the founders of Checkpoint and a bunch of other cyber security companies. Nir Zuk is also a US citizen and went out of his way to base PANW in the US, including their hardware manufacturing and software engineering operations.

You'll find former-intelligence blob operators in a great many cyber security companies. Including former American intel employees[0]. Hell, the CIA basically has their own VC fund[1].

Also, there is zero evidence any of these people are currently acting at the behest of their former employers, apart from obviously the CIA venture fund acts at the behest of the CIA.

0 - Robert M Lee https://dragos.com, Keith Alexander (formerly https://ironnet.com,) amongst many others

1 - In Q Tel https://www.iqt.org/

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.

Big difference

The mafia charges protection from itself, here the bad actors are out there and wiz help you protect from them.

Wiz selling doors with appropriate locks for your bussines.

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.

1.) What

You’re stretching here.

Companies hire private physical security all the time. Why is digital security different?

because the amount of money is so huge, the grandparent poster imagined there must be something wrong or sus going on. Likely due to personal biases.

And since most people's experience is shallow, the only analog they can muster is the mafia.

There are other CNAPP solutions. If you do an evaluation you will see why WIZ comes out on top.

What are some others?

https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/cloud-native-applicat...

> 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.

How on earth is it the government's job to protect people's software? It's a mere digital product, not human life or property.

Besides, people also buy padlocks and door locks for safety. Wiz is no different.

It would only be like the Mafia if they launched cyber attacks against your infra if you turned down their services.

Do you think that's what they do?

I do wonder how long it'll be until we uncover some scandal showing that the security companies are also the ones creating exploits.

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