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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

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.

If you have a problem with Unit 8200 alumni, you’re going to have a difficult time buying commercially available security products. Palo Alto Networks, Armis, Checkpoint, and many others were either founded by or otherwise have former 8200 folks on staff. Then there’s crowdstrike, founded by a Russian. Or Fortinet, which was founded by Ken Xie (born in Beijing.)

I guess you could base your entire security stack on F Secure. Everyone loves the Finns.

All of this "VPN" access software is pretty disgusting, from the perspective of the "VPN" "client". Absolutely untrustworthy bloated spying crap.

I boycot it every time I can just for this.

Wiz does many things. VPN, by any definition, is not one of them.

Where do you see Wiz in the above list of products in the post I'm responding to?

In any case, as for wiz..., if companies want to stuff their secrets into a proprietary product that is controlled by intelligence officers of a hostile (as in a lack of respect for international law) foreign country, I don't care. I know I would not.

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.

It's the only product I'm sometimes required to come in contact with from these companies. And also the only product of theirs that I inspected in any detail in Ghidra. And the only product of theirs that I have to defend my network against.

So I'm only interested in that aspect of their products. For everything else, all these security companies and their customers can devour each other, for all I care.

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> The founders of CrowdStrike—George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston—do not have publicly documented personal connections to Israel. That's the first claim of yours I faield to verify so I won't bother with the rest.

I realize reading is a very difficult skill to master, but maybe -- just maybe -- you couldn't verify that "claim" because I never made it.

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the comment stated that crowdstrike is founded by a Russian, not by Israel.

True

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)

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