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minosbull · 3 months ago

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n mid-March, Google announced that it was paying the staggering sum of $32 billion for the acquisition of the Israeli cloud-computing security company Wiz. The acquisition, pending regulatory approval, will be the largest ever of an Israeli firm.

“Organizations of all sizes—from start-ups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organizations—can use Wiz to protect everything they build and run in the cloud,” Google said in a statement announcing the acquisition. The statement added that Wiz would join Google Cloud, but that the Tel Aviv-based company’s security services would still be available across other cloud platforms used by major firms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

What was left unsaid in Google’s announcement, however, were the personal backgrounds of its four founders. The co-founders of Wiz—Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik—are all veterans of Unit 8200, the signals intelligence division of the Israeli military, which is playing a key role in helping to carry out Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Unit 8200 is an elite unit in the Israeli military tasked with intelligence gathering, surveillance, codebreaking, as well as cybersecurity operations and hacking. In addition to its role collecting information for intelligence reports, the unit has also been accused by former veterans of carrying out mass surveillance of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for the purpose of “political persecution,” as well as providing information used for targeted killings, sometimes based on over-broad interpretations of surveillance data.

In addition to being a vital component of the Israeli military-intelligence establishment, Unit 8200 has become a pipeline for recruitment by Silicon Valley firms. Many prominent tech startups have been created by Unit 8200 veterans, including NSO group, the creator of the Pegasus spyware program implicated in hacking attacks on dissidents and journalists globally.

“While Unit 8200 alumni once talked about their service in hushed tones, they now tout it in press releases to attract clients and investment money for their startups,” noted a Wall Street Journal story, from last year, on the growing relationship between the Israeli military unit and the U.S. tech industry.

In addition to founding their own startups, acquisitions by existing Silicon Valley firms have been a means for Unit 8200 veterans to get a foothold in the U.S. Since the start of the war in Gaza, Silicon Valley has acquired a handful of Israeli tech firms, including a nearly $1 billion purchase by Palo Alto Networks of Dig Security and Talon CyberSecurity—executed just weeks after the war began. Like Wiz, both those firms were also founded by former Unit 8200 members.

The increasingly cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military has alarmed observers of the industry who have been critical of the role of tech firms in facilitating Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

“Basically the entire Israeli tech industry is funded by U.S. venture capitalists. It’s a very common situation that you see acquisitions of Israeli firms by Silicon Valley, where the senior people in these firms have formerly served in Unit 8200. It gets them a voice internally,” said Paul Biggar, a software engineer and founder of the activist group Tech for Palestine. Commenting on Google’s huge new acquisition he said, “Wiz should not be trusted, because it takes all user data and runs it through an Israeli company run by former intelligence officials.”

A researcher who works on connections between Silicon Valley and the intelligence world told Drop Site that the Israeli intelligence establishment has built deep and expanding ties with U.S. tech companies, adding that they had documented over 1,400 current and former members of Unit 8200, Israeli Military Intelligence, and the Israeli Defense Forces Cyber Defense Directorate now working for major Silicon Valley companies. The researcher compiled the list from open source information about individuals, some of whom remain reservists in these units in addition their tech jobs, working in both senior and mid-level engineering and leadership roles at major firms like Cisco, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, Google, and many other companies in the U.S. tech sector, with offices based in Israel, the U.S., and Europe.

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“If you’re standing in the middle of Silicon Valley and throw a rock you’re going to hit current or former members of Unit 8200,” said the researcher who compiled and analyzed the data, and who asked for anonymity to discuss it safely. “That is not to say that all these people are involved in a giant cabal to influence American companies and steal our secrets—many of them are just people trying to get a career in tech.” But, they added, this could create “situations where there is temptation or pressure to do something that violates the law.”

In recent years, the influence of foreign powers in critical industries like tech has been identified as a national security risk by U.S. security agencies. A 2018 article in Politico highlighted the increasing alarm of FBI officials over counterintelligence and espionage threats in Silicon Valley. The risks include individuals either directly acting as spies for foreign powers, or being pressured by them to cooperate based on personal ties or political allegiances. Cybersecurity experts warn that such relationships create a form of leverage that foreign governments could draw upon when required, and which is heightened when the tech workers themselves are reservists or former intelligence operatives.

“We go on about the dangers of Chinese infiltration of tech firms, but not Israel—even though U.S. intelligence agencies rank Israel as one of their top counterintelligence threats after countries like China, Russia and Iran,” the researcher said. They also highlighted, in the case of Wiz, the risk of a “former member of an intelligence agency working in a sensitive area of U.S. tech, especially something like cloud storage, that has access to a lot of data that is very easy to scrape or download or transfer.”

Cash Bailout

The acquisition of Wiz by Google is a huge cash injection for the Israeli economy as a whole, which has been battered over the past year and a half amid ongoing wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. The company’s 1,800 employees, many of whom are based in Israel, will also receive $1.5 billion in the arrangement. According to Times of Israel, as a result of the purchase, the collective tax benefits paid to the Israeli government by the founders, investors, and employees of Wiz is estimated to be in the neighborhood of $4 billion.

“The estimated tax revenue Israel could earn from the transaction is equal to about 0.6 percent of the GDP,” the article noted, adding that Google’s decision would actually aid the government in continuing its ongoing wars by helping to “relieve government pressure to introduce measures to fund the war’s defense and civilian expenditures and bring down the budget deficit and high debt levels.”

Moody’s, a financial service that forecasts economic stability, had previously reduced Israel’s credit rating twice due to geopolitical uncertainty and economic disruptions related to the war. In late March, the rating agency pointed specifically to the country’s weakening tech sector as a risk to maintaining its tax base.

“Uncertainty over Israel’s longer-term security and economic growth prospects are much higher than is typical, with risks to the high-tech sector particularly relevant, given its important role as a driver of economic growth and significant contributor to the government’s tax take,” the agency said in a report warning of further risks ahad.

Google’s decision to pay massively for Wiz thus amounts to a de facto bailout of the Israeli economy, coming at a time that the company is also attempting to build closer ties with Trump administration regulators. While the Israeli economy, and, in particular, its tech sector have been battered by the war, Google has recently announced plans to rent over 60,000 square meters of office space in Tel Aviv, paying over $300 million over a decade to lease a massive corporate office in the city’s ToHa2 Tower. These investment decisions have aided of Israel even as it has come under increasing scrutiny over its conduct during the war.

Well before the current war, employees of Google had been rallying to demand that the company cancel a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military known as Project Nimbus. The project, signed as a joint project with Google and Amazon, offered advanced cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technology services to the Israeli government. Among the capabilities that the Israeli government would eventually receive as part of the ongoing deal are access to facial detection, image recognition, and sentiment analysis tools useful to conducting reconnaissance and surveillance. Following internal protests over Project Nimbus, including sit-ins at multiple offices, Google fired dozens of employees who were part of the group “No Tech for Apartheid.”

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AI-based platforms reliant on cloud technology, which Google rushed to provide to Israel after October 7, have been integral to the Israeli military’s assault on the Gaza Strip. AI programs like Lavender and Where’s Daddy, first revealed by the Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine, have been used to automatically generate targets for assassination, marking over 37,000 Palestinians and their homes in Gaza as targets. With assistance from the program, officers in the military granted “sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”

The use of Google and Amazon technology by the Israeli military, including cloud-services like those now likely to be augmented by Wiz, has drawn the scrutiny of tech-centric civil liberties organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which criticized last year the reported use of such technologies to assist with, “detentions, killings, and the systematic oppression of journalists, healthcare workers, aid workers, and ordinary families.”

The acquisition of Wiz by Google is likely to strengthen the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military-intelligence establishment, with veterans of Unit 8200 playing a key role.

“For the biggest acquisition of an Israeli cybersecurity company to come at this moment is a big ‘mask-off’ moment for Google and Big Tech,” said Hossam Nasr, an organizer in a campaign called No Azure for Apartheid, and a former Microsoft employee who was dismissed for participating in a vigil at the company. “You are going to have former Unit 8200 agents getting access to Google technology and data. And I do not trust Google to not allow it to be used for nefarious purposes.”

Nick Rodelo contributed research for this article.

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israelseen1 · 3 months ago

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CTECH: Israel's Latest Innovation & Technology News Mar. 21, 2025

CTECH: Israel’s Latest Innovation & Technology News Mar. 21, 2025 Munich Re acquiring Next Insurance at $2.6 billion valuation. The acquisition will see the digital insurer become part of Munich Re’s ERGO Group, expanding its presence in the U.S. small business insurance market. Read more Wiz CEO: “Cybersecurity is becoming Israel’s equivalent of Wall Street.” Assaf Rappaport says the $32 billion…

#CTECH #current affairs #israel #Israelis

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techverse1 · 3 months ago

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Google to Acquire Wiz for $32 Billion in Landmark Cloud Security Deal

March 2025 – Google has announced its largest acquisition to date, a $32 billion all-cash deal to acquire cloud security firm Wiz. This move underscores Google’s commitment to strengthening cybersecurity within its cloud computing services.

What is Wiz?

Founded in 2020, Wiz has rapidly become a leading name in cloud security. Its platform provides real-time threat detection and risk mitigation, allowing businesses to secure multi-cloud environments from a single dashboard.

Wiz supports security monitoring across major cloud platforms, including:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud

Oracle Cloud

Why is Google Buying Wiz?

Cyber threats against cloud platforms have surged, prompting businesses and governments to seek advanced security solutions. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian stated that integrating Wiz will enhance Google Cloud’s security offerings and expand its multi-cloud capabilities.

"Together, Google Cloud and Wiz will set a new standard for cloud security, providing businesses with greater flexibility and protection," Kurian said in a press release.

Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport emphasized that the partnership will help organizations safeguard their cloud operations more effectively.

Google’s Biggest Cybersecurity Investment Yet

Reports indicate that Google previously offered $23 billion for Wiz in 2023, but the company initially rejected the deal, considering an IPO instead. With this new agreement, Wiz will join Google Cloud Security’s expanding portfolio, which includes:

Google Security Operations

Security Command Center Enterprise

Chrome Enterprise

Mandiant Consulting (acquired by Google for $5.4 billion in 2022)

When Will the Acquisition Be Finalized?

The deal is pending regulatory approval and is expected to be completed by 2026. If approved, it will position Google Cloud as a stronger competitor against AWS and Microsoft Azure in the enterprise cybersecurity market.

Conclusion

Google’s acquisition of Wiz signals a major shift in the cloud security industry. As cyber threats continue to evolve, this deal aims to provide businesses with enhanced protection and greater flexibility in managing cloud security.

Stay tuned for further updates on this historic cloud security acquisition.

#GoogleAcquisition #WizCybersecurity #CloudSecurity #TechNews

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isfeed · 9 months ago

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Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport is coming to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

The tech world took a major double take this year when a security startup called Wiz founded out of Israel just four years earlier became the subject of a record-breaking, $23 billion acquisition attempt by Google — an offer the startup boldly proceeded … to refuse. Really? Yes, really. We will be talking to Assaf Rappaport, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use…

#technology

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yhwhrulz · 11 months ago

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teknolojihaber · 1 year ago

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Alphabet, bulut siber güvenlik girişimi Wiz'i 23 milyar dolara alıyor

WSJ'nin haberine göre, Google'ın ana şirketi Alphabet, bulut siber güvenlik girişimi Wiz'i 23 milyar dolarlık rekor bir bedelle satın almak için müzakerelerin son aşamasında . Anlaşma başarısız olursa bu satın alma, Alphabet'in Motorola Mobility'yi 2012'de 12,5 milyar dolara satın almasından bu yana tarihindeki en büyük satın alma işlemi olabilir. New York merkezli ve 2020 yılında CEO Assaf Rappaport ve ortakları tarafından kurulan Wiz, kısa sürede etkileyici sonuçlara ulaştı. Şirket, bu yılın başlarında 12 milyar dolarlık piyasa değeriyle 1 milyar dolar fon topladı ve yapay zeka endüstrisi dışında 2024 değerlemesini başaran birkaç girişimden biri. Wiz'in başarısı, özellikle on yılın başlarındaki teknoloji patlamasından dolayı sersemlemiş olan startup pazarındaki genel gerilemenin ortasında özellikle dikkate değer. Şirket, yalnızca 18 aylık operasyonların ardından yıllık 100 milyon dolar sürekli gelir elde ettiğini ve bu rakamın 2023'te 350 milyon dolara çıkacağını söyledi. Google'ın (Alphabet) Wiz'e olan ilgisi, arama devi ve diğer teknoloji şirketlerine yönelik antitröst incelemelerinin arttığı bir dönemde ortaya çıkıyor. Özellikle Google, İnternet arama ve reklam teknolojileri alanındaki antitröst yasalarını ihlal ettiği suçlamasıyla ABD Adalet Bakanlığı'nın açtığı davalarla karşı karşıya kaldı. Bu satın alma aynı zamanda Alphabet'in, şirketin şu anda rakiplerini geride bıraktığı, önemi giderek artan ve hızla büyüyen bir iş alanı olan bulut bilişimdeki konumunu güçlendirmeye de yardımcı olabilir. Bu iş alanının hızlı büyümesine rağmen (Google geçen yıl büyüdü), şirket hâlâ pazar liderlerinin önemli ölçüde gerisinde kalıyor ve Amazon ve Microsoft'un ardından üçüncü sırada yer alıyor. Anlaşma başarılı olursa, özellikle antitröst riskleri ve yüksek faiz oranları nedeniyle birleşme ve satın almalardaki (M&A) genel yavaşlama göz önüne alındığında, teknoloji sektöründe yakın zamandaki en büyük anlaşmalardan biri olacak. İlginç bir şekilde, Amerikalı çok uluslu Cisco, aynı zamanda BT altyapısının sorunlarını gidermeye odaklanan yazılım geliştiricisi Splunk'u 28 milyar dolarlık satın alma işlemini bu yılın başlarında tamamladı ve büyük şirketler arasında BT güvenliğine artan ilgiyi bir kez daha doğruladı. Read the full article

#google #wiz

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h1p3rn0v4 · 2 years ago

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Wiz se conecta a proveedores de almacenamiento como Amazon Web Services o Microsoft Azure y analiza todo lo que se almacena en la nube, señalando y priorizando los riesgos de seguridad. Wiz no es la única empresa que aprovecha el auge de la seguridad en la nube –se enfrenta a un gigante revitalizado que cotiza en bolsa como Palo Alto Networks (75.000 millones de dólares de capitalización bursátil) y a rivales bien financiados–, ni siquiera fue de las primeras. Pero es indiscutiblemente el actor del momento.

Tras el inicio de la pandemia, cuando las OPV tecnológicas se paralizaron y las startups se encontraron con que el acceso a fondos frescos se había agotado en su mayor parte, Douglas Leone, el multimillonario ex líder mundial de Sequoia, escribió un memorando a los CEO de cartera de la firma, instándoles a centrarse en los beneficios por encima del crecimiento descontrolado. Después, llamó a Rappaport con un breve apéndice: «Lo que dije no era para ti».

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innocentamit · 4 years ago

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Atmosec Raises $ 6M To Help SaaS Agencies Improve Security

Atmosec, the start-up cybersecurity company in Tel Aviv, has raised $ 6 million seed money helping to protect the SaaS environment by helping to identify and mitigate. The fund was led by y Glilot Capital Partners and Battery Ventures, with participation from Co-Founders of Armis, Yevgeny Dibrov (CEO) and Nadir Izrael (CTO); Wiz Co-Founder and CEO, Assaf Rappaport and Ofer Ben-Noon, Co-Founder…

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msgates · 5 years ago

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Former Microsoft Exec Assaf Rappaport's New Startup Raises $21 Million Click here for articles February 09, 2020 at 11:15PM

#microsoft #English

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israelseen1 · 11 months ago

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CTECH: Latest Israeli Innovation & Technology News July 24, 2024

CTECH: Latest Israeli Innovation & Technology News July 24, 2024 From IPO dreams to CrowdStrike’s crisis: Inside the collapse of the Wiz-Google mega deal. The timing of CEO Assaf Rappaport’s announcement that Wiz was walking away from the Google deal on the eve of the giant’s earnings report indicates that he was mulling the decision until the very last moment. The fear of becoming history at the…

#CTECH #current affairs #Innovation #israel #Israelis #News #technology

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isfeed · 11 months ago

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Wiz rejects Google’s $23 billion takeover in favor of IPO

Wiz reportedly abandoned the deal over antitrust and investor concerns. | Illustration: The Verge Cybersecurity startup Wiz has turned down a $23 billion takeover bid from Google’s parent, Alphabet, breaking off what would have been the largest acquisition in the search giant’s history. In an internal memo seen by CNBC, Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport said the company would instead pursue an…

#Business

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crazyavenuewonderland-blog · 8 years ago

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Microsoft hopes to strengthen cloud security with latest acquisition

Microsoft has acquired security company Adallom in a bid to give IT departments more control over application access and data stored across cloud services.

The growing popularity of cloud services and the move of critical apps from in-house data centers is putting pressure on vendors to offer more advanced management tools. With the acquisition of Adallom, Microsoft is addressing the security part of that puzzle.

The financial details of the deal were not announced.

Adallom expands on Microsoft’s existing identity offerings, among other things adding a cloud access security broker, to give customers visibility and control over application access as well as critical data stored across cloud services, Microsoft said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Adallom promises that SaaS applications can be as secure as on-site applications. The software offers the ability to monitor privileged user accounts, prevent data leaks and protect the sharing of confidential corporate data. The company's platform can also help with regulatory and compliance mandates for data in the cloud, according to the company's website.

In addition to Office 365, Adallom's software can also be used to protect cloud applications including Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, ServiceNow and Ariba.

Microsoft didn't provide many details on what its plans are for the company, saying only that Adallom will complement existing offerings that are part of Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), including the recent Advanced Threat Analytics release.

Adallom also works with Amazon Web Services. It may continue to do so, since Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella has become more open to working with vendors it also competes with.

Adallom, co-founded in 2012 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, will continue to evolve, build technology, sell solutions and work with customers as the integration is completed, Microsoft said.

"This is just the beginning and we’re excited for what the future has in store. We look forward to having you join us for this next chapter," Rappaport said in a blog post.

Adallom is an abbreviation of the Hebrew saying “Ad Halom,” which literally means “up to here” and in game theory lingo means “the last line of defense,” according to Adallom's website.

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