> 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...

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.

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

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

Right off the bat though, I don't trust Gartner or their rating system at all, I'm more interested in what Wix offers that is technically ahead of their competition (no CIO marketing dribble).

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.

Do you think that's what they do,m

As I understand it, Unit 8200 is the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, and Mossad is their CIA.

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

Foreign or not is binary. There's no comparison because everything boils down to a 1 or a 0.

I boycot it every time I can just for this.

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.

You’re responding to something that isn’t there.

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.

Unit 8200 have been heavily implicated in the genocide case against Israel at the International Criminal Court, to say joining this genocidal cult is part course for the average Israeli is disturbing to say the least.

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.

Would you rather they have kept the technology to themselves?

Do you have any evidence to show that no one ever quits 8200?

"Now Avishai has left 8200 and went off to co-found Wix, the website building tool. It’s crazy to think that the co-founder of Wix is an expert hacker, someone who’s broken into multiple countries and conducted massive amounts of espionage."

"Once you get out of 8200 you’re then a reserve and have to spend up to three weeks a year going back to 8200, refreshing your skills all the way until you’re forty"

"There’s also a yearly reunion where you leave your family and spend a week with your fellow soldiers you served with. Every year they do that. Keep in mind, all this is happening in a place not even as big as New Jersey with roughly the same population. Look at how dedicated they are to keeping these connections with one another. This has powerful results. Everyone knows everyone."

"Imagine if one 8200 member goes off to work at Google to help "develop the Chrome browser and then goes back to 8200 as part of their yearly duty and while there, they see a soldier building exploits for the Chrome browser. What do they do? Do they take the exploits from 8200 and patch it in Chrome or do they help their fellow soldier by sharing the source code?"

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

You start with "ever" and then you go to "well, only until 40 for the military reserve service". Mental gymnastics at its finest.

BTW, when you reach a certain income level you never called for reserve. It's too expensive for the government to pay people like that.

And people aren’t just “identifying folk.” This thread has devolved into a debate about Israel itself, which invariably happens when Israel is even tangentially involved in a story.

If you do nothing jewish, then I would argue that you are not jewish in a cultural sense. You still would be a jew from a religious point of view (if your mom is jewish), but if you do nothing jewish, then you are not jewish.

I guess what I am trying to say is being jewish is not ethnicity only, or religion only, it's both. For example, converts are considered jews despite their non-jewish ethnicity.

Currently, there is a prohibition on using that right and "professing" another religion. Blame the haredi, according to my granfather they're as*holes.

You could get a visa and naturalize like anyone else that is eligible.

I am eligible because my great grandmother was there before statehood in the Irgun.

Me too, but a lot of (admittedly not all) opposition to Israel's existence, extent, and its security apparatus is rooted in anti-semitism. I'm not going to undertake a long discussion about it, but in short, you can hear the dog whistles and they're inappropriate.

learn your definition

This thread is over.

(This is not intended to reflect any opinion I may have about Israel's specific practices.)

I think its possible to fairly critize a nation state and and intelligence agency but some criticismtends towards mossad shark type conspiracies

I dont think

germans in the holocaust murdered jews that had converted to christianity or simply had a jewish parent or grandparent

Every time a story involves Israel somehow--even if it's about the success of a business based there--it turns into a debate about Israel itself. It's exhausting and stupid.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

From the outset the term "anti-Semitism" bore special racial connotations and meant specifically prejudice against Jews. The term has been described as confusing, for in modern usage 'Semitic' designates a language group, not a race. In this sense, the term is a misnomer, since there are many speakers of Semitic languages (e.g., Arabs, Ethiopians, and Assyrians) who are not the objects of antisemitic prejudices, while there are many Jews who do not speak Hebrew, a Semitic language. Though 'antisemitism' could be construed as prejudice against people who speak other Semitic languages, this is not how the term is commonly used.

The term may be spelled with or without a hyphen (antisemitism or anti-Semitism). Many scholars and institutions favor the unhyphenated form. Shmuel Almog argued, "If you use the hyphenated form, you consider the words 'Semitism', 'Semite', 'Semitic' as meaningful ... [I]n antisemitic parlance, 'Semites' really stands for Jews, just that." Emil Fackenheim supported the unhyphenated spelling, in order to "[dispel] the notion that there is an entity 'Semitism' which 'anti-Semitism' opposes."

Others endorsing an unhyphenated term for the same reason include the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance," historian Deborah Lipstadt, Padraic O'Hare, professor of Religious and Theological Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College; and historians Yehuda Bauer and James Carroll. According to Carroll, who first cites O'Hare and Bauer on "the existence of something called 'Semitism'", "the hyphenated word thus reflects the bipolarity that is at the heart of the problem of antisemitism".

The Associated Press and its accompanying AP Stylebook adopted the unhyphenated spelling in 2021. Style guides for other news organizations such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal later adopted this spelling as well. It has also been adopted by many Holocaust museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem.

There are exemptions for people with disabilities, health issues with risk factors, extreme poverty, problematic family situations, teen parents, etc, as you would expect there to be in any western democracy.

For any other healthy citizen that's not exempt by law - males in particular - military service is as compulsory as paying taxes.

> It is a choice

I'll never understand why people who aren't Israelis, don't live in Israel, can't read or speak Hebrew, and probably have never even bothered to talk to an Israeli, for some bizarre reason feel qualified to talk so authoritatively about a place half way around the globe that they've never been to.

EDIT Editing your post like this to hide how wrong you were after the fact is misleading, but by now we've seen that this is typical behavior for people in your ideological camp.

I am also aware that the vast majority do not, and would consider it unthinkable to refuse.

I was surprised at the quote so I looked up your source[1] and it describes the ways Israelis avoid conscription by using exceptions/deferrals such as being Palestinian, being ultra-Orthodox, having physical or psychological conditions. Others just choose to go to military prison.

Sounds pretty mandatory to me, at least how the word is commonly used.

[1] https://truthout.org/articles/more-israelis-are-refusing-dep...

> Although military service is often described as a national duty in Israel, conscription is in fact far from universal. As little as 50 percent of Israeli citizens actually enlist, according to left-leaning Mesarvot (Hebrew for “I Refuse”), a network of Israeli refusers to which Behar Tsalik belongs.

EDIT: You did update your comment with the full quote, but only after I posted this. That's disingenuous of you, and I'm out of this discussion.

For us they replaced a bunch of different tools and a hodgepodge of custom scripts and hacks.

For those who have not heard of them - it's basically asset and vulnerability management for absolutely everything you have running in the cloud. This includes stuff running in your k8s clusters, etc. And they do all this without having to manage a fleet of agents on everything and costing you money in resource usage. Not that Wiz is cheap, far from it :(

Just because you aren’t the target market for something doesn’t mean it isn’t real or valuable.

Source: used to compete against them. I no longer have any dog in this fight.

It can scan a lot of stuff and give you pretty interesting insights and alerts.

And do you know what managers like? It creates Jira tickets automatically with all the findings, and they can assign them to people and say they've done their thing. We hate that because tickets appear and disappear magically in hundreds each time Wiz scans, sometimes with no obvious explanations.

But here come some of the bad things:

  - UI/UX: Terrible. It's so difficult and confusing reaching from one place to the other and finding stuff that you had open just instants ago. Slow too. I've seen the security people do nice filters and search queries but it's not intuitive at all.
  - Doesn't support very basic features. For example, in Docker Hub they don't support scanning full organizations or using organizational tokens for scanning individual repositories. They personally told me in our support channel that they were looking into it... in April 2023. Still waiting. (The API is slightly different than a regular Docker Hub public repo but, come on, an enterprise security tool that doesn't support connecting to a Docker Hub org... that's just silly)
  - Closed docs. You can only check the docs if logged in. I hate that and also limits the work with people that's not a Wiz user.
  - Terraform provider:
    It's quite limited, that means you need A LOT of manual work to integrate stuff with their scanners
    It's changelog URL doesn't work, so good luck with knowing when features appear or when you get breaking changes
    No source AFAIK, you just get a binary. Good luck.
  - Pricing. Can't remember the specifics but I hear a lot of complaints about how expensive they are. Also, no public pricing.

I have seen Wiz at AWS re:Invent multiple years in a row, and have seen their product used to good success in multiple companies I've worked with. It's not vaporware, it's a real product that really works and has a place in the cloud/container security space. I don't think anyone is lying here at all. The fact it's /also/ an acquisition vehicle as a path to an exit for the founders is a separate thing.

Second, I have no idea what you're doing to get Wix results from a search for Wiz. When I search for Wiz, I get a whole bunch of results about Wiz, including links to discussion threads where random people (i.e., not high-rep HN users) also talk about how much they like the product.

Finally, something to consider: would Google actually pay $32B for a company that "nobody has heard of" and doesn't provide any value? Probably not. I would hope not.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Whatever you say about someone else, you're saying about yourself. It's an idiom, so the translation is a bit funky.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

Sometimes the simpler explanation is the correct one.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

https://undercodenews.com/from-idf-intelligence-to-a-2b-goog...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Realize that you are in a bullshit ungoogleable industry and quite down before you ruin it for everyone.

The cloud is just another person's computer. There is no such thing as security when someone has physical access to the device no matter how many layers of encryption.

I feel like the majority of anti-jew sentiment is from pro-palestine arab people and adjacent. At least In my country. They really believe "jews run the world" once you debate them enough they admit it and there is no changing of their minds.

Why not hate all groups that are involved in the Middle East conflict? :-)

Yep. Realized the confusion!

> I feel like the majority of anti-jew sentiment is from pro-palestine arab people and adjacent

Most people haven't met an Israeli or traveled to Israel.

Also, most users on HN are Americans or Northern European who overwhelmingly use Reddit, so everyone has some weird fringe mentality about one side or the other.

Honestly, most Israelis and Arabs act the same - I mean most Israelis are Mizrahi and normal/collquial Hebrew is heavily Arabic based (where else will you here people say "Yalla" in every other sentence)

My point is, anyone who isn't Israeli (be they Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Ethiopian, Arab, Druze, Chechen, etc) or Palestinian should stfu (me included).

You have wackos saying "Israel is a fake state" or "raze Gaza into a parking lot". Yet if you talk to an actual Israeli their opinions are much more prosaic. It's just a complex situation that outsiders shouldn't comment on.

On the contrary: for the vast sums of money and military power we contribute to keep the lights on over there, US citizens should have two or three votes each in Israeli elections and free airfare to and lodging in the country. Oh, and access to their quite generous healthcare subsidies as well.

I will never have an opinion on this conflict again, as I am white. I am so sorry. I will listen and learn while pro palestine people protest here in Sweden and advocate for Israel to be wiped off the map.

I have travelled to Israel a bunch of times and worked with a lot (proportionately) of Israelis and Jews. I generally really really like working with them, like their attitude and love the vibe of Tel Aviv.

That doesn't mean that I support or agree with their behaviour in Palestine particularly.

Like, I have often hated US foreign policy, but have always been OK with US citizens. The two things are very different.

Are we supposed to sit and take it?

Why are you shouting?

Who do you think lives there, mainly?

Sick of this double standard.

I also don't think genocide is an appropriate response

Sick of this double standard.

That is not true at all.

What I wrote is true.

What are you on about?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

- 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

Wiz has only been around for 5-years.

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.

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.

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).

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...

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

They add features weekly or faster.

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.

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

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

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 force 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/

It's interesting that many people working in intelligence found ways to become very successful in business. I wonder what is the reason.

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.

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

But also, and may more important, you get to see everyones cloud usage, across all providers, with a high level of permissions. Said differently, Google can now target customers with massive spend across other cloud providers and work to migrate them to GCP, at a price that's just cheap enough to over come the switching cost.

Here's the letter sent by the CEO Assaf Rappaport to his team at the time (2024):

"Wizards,

I know the last week has been intense, with the buzz about a potential acquisition. While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz.

Let me cut to the chase: our next milestones are $1 billion in ARR and an IPO.

Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice."

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/22/wiz-walks-away-from-google...

Maybe like the Motorola acquisition - not so much the profit attributle from the acquisition but the profit they *won't* lose by not acquiring them.

The window is closed and locked. Haven't closed the storm shutters yet.

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

Edit: this is all just examples

I am sure I am misunderstanding something, but I'm not sure what.

You're missing that a lot of "security" is in reality just a bunch of check-boxes for a form that someone asks you to fill out.

The security you need to really think about is outside of those checkboxes, and it seems like Wiz is not for this type of security, but the former.

Yes there are other parts to HIPAA than just VM config, but it’s just giving you policies and checks out of the box

And that still provides a lot of value to the right customers.

/s

The problem with the cloud, from a security standpoint is that is it much more complex than a traditional on-premise infrastructure, especially if you go the "managed services" route and have minimal code.

They have other capabilities, but that’s the primary value add.

Imagine you are working for a fortune 100 company with hundreds of thousands of cloud resources. You can’t manage them individually.

In my setup I have Home Assistant running on an N100 mini PC and that's what I use as an HomeKit bridge.

If possible I'd use ZigBee or Z-Wave bulbs (or even better, switches) though.

https://shelly.guide/add-a-shelly-to-your-wi-fi-through-web-...

The real value is it's linter for _any_ cloud config - you can use terraform or cloudformation or just click around in user interface, and Wiz's rules would still work.

Yeah - that’s not likely to happen. Even the current in-house developed multi-cloud security stuff Google has doesn’t let internal people see customer data. It’s right there in the T&Cs they publish and agree to.

I suppose they could be violating them in egregious ways, but that wouldn’t last long before one or more of the 170,000 employees got upset and went all whistleblower, which would lead to billions of dollars in lawsuits.

Then you slice and dice the analytics data to extract what you need in the name of planning & improving the product.

(Cloud Access Security Broker)

Large enterprises don't sign the stock terms and conditions that would enable this, most do or should have legal teams redlining contracts around how cloud data is accessed and used by vendors. Maybe Wiz is so good they would agree to it, but it would get challenged and negotiated during the sales cycle.

That's probably cos I am far away from this space.

Says the 16 minute old account spewing racist garbage in other comments. Funny how it's always the most obvious ones.

Anyone saying they used Wiz is a piece of shit liar xD

The company was only formed to acquire other companies, then be acquired.

Nobody used their product.

Nobody used their product.

It shouldn't be overlooked that acquiring Wiz is also a way for Google to secure a beachhead in half the Fortune 100, many of which are "enemy" territory.

The price is high, but there aren't many options available and Wiz has the advantage of being built on Google Cloud natively, and already have Marketplace integrations completed.

https://cloud.google.com/customers/wiz

As a Googler who works in GCP security, security has been a key differentiator for GCP long before the Mandiant acquisition. Google invented BeyondCorp (a primary driver of Zero Trust). Google helped create security keys (U2F, FIDO, Webauthn), and was I think the first major company to adopt them, both for employees, and for consumers. Google was one of the first major companies to offer a bug bounty, in 2010. Google's Project Zero searching for vulnerabilities in other companies'/organizations' software I think was pretty much unprecedented when it was created. Look at the number of times other tech companies get hacked compared to Google. Google got hacked in 2009 by China (I believe that was the first time a major company admitted to being hacked by government). That was a major turning point. Ever since then it's been "never again".

Disclosure: my thoughts are my own.

Your whole post is confusing Security of the Cloud with Security in the Cloud. And conflating GCP with Google but those are just examples of why GCP has such a small market percentage.

Additionally:

Google offers BeyondCorp products as GCP products. A big example is IAP. Do AWS and Azure offer something like IAP? If so, I think they were created in response to IAP.

Another Google/GCP security product related to zero trust is Chrome Enterprise Premium: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/int... .

Another innovative GCP security product is VPC Service Controls. Do AWS and Azure offer something like that? If so, I think they were created in response to VPC Service Controls.

Security keys: I mentioned in my previous comment how they're used by consumers (that includes GCP customers). GCP is making MFA mandatory this year: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/man...

Bug bounties protect GCP customers by making sure GCP products don't have vulnerabilities.

Project Zero protects GCP customers by finding vulnerabilities in products that GCP customers use (although it also finds vulnerabilities in products that AWS and Azure customers use).

When Microsoft got hacked by China in 2023, China stole Microsoft's signing key, and used it to mint tokens to impersonate Azure AD users of Microsoft customers. That's relevant to security in the Cloud.

GCP products are also recognized for security:

https://cloud.google.com/resources/forrester-unstructured-da...

https://www.varonis.com/blog/forrester-wave-data-security-pl...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure-modern...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/goo...

https://www.teradata.com/press-releases/2020/forrester-2020-...

> Google got hacked in 2009 by China (I believe that was the first time a major company admitted to being hacked by government).

Do they mind if they're legally "hacked" by a (Western) govt? All that security sophistication couldn't prevent LEAs from owning us all, unfortunately: https://therecord.media/google-refuses-to-deny-it-received-u... / https://archive.vn/mzZtI

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24751821 > Snowden leaks: Google 'outraged' at alleged NSA hacking

Yes, it's a lot less flexible than AWS IAM, but complicated IAM policies with conditions and stuff can be really hard to reason about.

Disclosure: my thoughts are my own.

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.

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.

AWS allows to use multiple accounts easily, and accounts are (by default) completely isolated from each other. That's actually how services work internally at AWS, it's not uncommon for a service to have hundreds of AWS accounts (one for each region multipled by the number of environments).

It's not so easy with GCP.

There was one other time Google was hacked by a major government that also spurred massive internal security posture changes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_effect#Tech_industry

e.g. half of Fortune 100 use Wiz and I assure you most of them do not use GCP (or do not use only GCP)

gonna need a citation on that. All I could find was their own quotes.

If Google wants to be "the best of the best" at security and some set of potential customers use Wiz as their "best of the best" security, then this is a way to convert those customers to Google.

Consider some org that prioritizes security, like at the board level. They maybe don't really care about the nickel and dime cost of AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP since it comes out to 10s or 100s of millions of opex in the end. What they do care about is the cleanest record possible with respect to security. And Wiz is a key component to their position on security that is communicated to investors - it is a social proof that they are taking security very seriously.

This now becomes a tool for Google when trying to win their business. By degrading the value of Wiz on AWS/Azure/Oracle/Salesforce they are taking away that bullet point on security for a subset of competitors customers. And that may entice some of them to move their entire cloud service to GCP. So whatever revenue they lose on the Wiz side from a dozen or so cancellations they would hope to make up with a few 100 million dollar whales.

I just find it hard to believe that enough whale level cloud compute business will be generated in this way to justify $32b. This is really the best take I have on the acquisition and it feels unsatisfying, as if there is some other decisive information that would provide a justification for such a valuation.

Maybe there is some government mandate coming down the pipeline that isn't very public yet? Some kind of legislation that will force companies to adopt stricter security policies? That could precipitate the kind of changes that would justify this kind of massive valuation.

Degrading Wiz capabilities on AWS/Azure/etc will not drive more customers to Googke. CSPM and cloud workloads don’t go hand in hand. What will happen is that other companies will capture the market share left by Google. Will the offerings be less then Wiz quality-wise? Sure, but it will be way cheaper than moving to GCP.

The best option will be to leave Wiz as it is - standalone.

If that is their objective, they will fail again, since this is the land of good account management. Being able to call somebody on the phone if required. Something AWS excels on, Microsoft a little bit, while Google is rumored to have humans working there, but they are rarely seen.

I don’t think we even had talking points about why AWS was better than GCP like we did Azure.

I personally know of 2 big GCP customers who, over the years, left GCP because of this and the impact it had in critical situations. This very feedback was given in both cases to people considerably high up on GCP's ladder and... nothing's ever changed.

I'm sure plenty other big migrations off GCP provided the same feedback, to no avail.

When Diane Greene first and then Thomas Kurian became Google Cloud CEOs people thought that finally, due to their previous experiences in very Enterprise-aggressive companies, they would improve massively on that front.

Did they improve the situation? a bit. Massively? bringing GCP finally on-par with anyone else (not better than anyone else, just... the same)? nope, not even close.

It was the last Google organization to have a genuine sustained hiring spree and didn't face nearly the same amount of cutbacks

I'm just trying to make sense of the numbers.

According to Amazon's Wiz integration (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ibgbkrqusncsm), the lowest cost they have is $24,000/year.

I don't really see the benefits of this acquisition for Google, but congrats to the Wiz team!

At the very least it's a giant book of sales leads.

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?

This is an enterprise product in a space where companies spend millions of dollars.

Still seems like an insane amount though.

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...

EDIT: just checked my payment history and in November 2013 I paid €0.89 for "One Year Service"

Given that likely rolls up other products I doubt it's all coming from Whatsapp.

[0]: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/1f8bf8e...

> Wiz combines a graph search for asset management with agentless vuln and malware scanning that clones EBS volumes and scans them on their infrastructure. That's a great combo for vuln management, but has some downsides like delays between scans and cloud costs. They have a sensor with solid detection rules, and are okay at a bunch of other stuff like cloud log threat detection and sensitive data detection. They've basically pushed what you can do without an agent to the limit.

VC approach to enterprise sales, https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042462

> [Cyberstarts] shows an internal rate of return of more than 100%, an unusual figure even for the best funds in the world.. The first sales come from the loyal CISOs who work with the fund.. Ra'anan offers [CISOs] the big dream of the world of employees - shares in a venture capital fund.. all funds that specialize in cyber go after CISOs and entice them with dinners, conferences, and some also offer them holdings in the fund. However.. he perfected it to a completely different level.. No CISO has ever received compensation for purchasing products.. They receive 4% of the success fees of the general partner (GP) in the fund.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/23/24204198/google-wiz-acqui...

What usually happens otherwise? Would they do partly google stock, etc? And each shareholder gets some kind of multiple? (you get your N amount of Wiz shares X .72 = your number of google shares), or something of that sort?

Google pays each of Wiz's shareholders 75-90% of the deal amount. The remainder is held in escrow and paid some time later based on a variety of conditions.

> What usually happens otherwise? Would they do partly google stock, etc? And each shareholder gets some kind of multiple? (you get your N amount of Wiz shares X .72 = your number of google shares), or something of that sort?

Yup, that's exactly how it works.

This will protect the buyer against misrepresentations.

There are often also targets that have to be met to achieve the full purchase price but not always disclosed

Typically these involve at least some stock (cash + stock or all stock) which would mean that each Wiz share gets some amount of money and some multiple of Google stock per share.

I have had shares that are 1. force sold, 2. shares that were force split into two companies and 3. shares that are force acquired so they become another companies shares.

I'm sad they're being acquired, especially by a FAANG company. This constant consolidation is bad for IT (and the economy in general). I am happy for the employees holding shares though!

Growing up in NYC, it is was impossible to not remember the "Nobody Beats the Wiz" jingle

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

You have never used them nor heard of them.

You are full of shit.

I like it too. Don't care much for google buying them, it can only end badly.

All they ever did was acquire a bunch of companies to be acquired as 1.

Anyone claiming they used their product, they're great, etc. are lying.

what makes you so sure there is no product?

Companies like CrowdStrike have copied a lot of what Wiz has been doing (and I'm sure wiz has copied some CrowdStrike features).

This announcement is pretty disappointing to me. I would have more faith in Wiz as an independent company than as part of Google. I expect their innovation to fall off a cliff.

It was to put a bunch under 1 umbrella, then get acquired by Google.

You never used their product.

Anyone saying they used their product etc. are so full of shit.

The main problem with this site, like Reddit, is the rampant lying. There is no real info here anymore

The company was only formed to acquire others, which it did, and is now being acquired.

It never offered a product. People are lying.

Working in a company adjacent to Wiz, I’ve encountered many organizations working with it.

Don’t project your lack of knowledge onto others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034

That being said, Instagram and WhatsApp were expensive for Facebook and those ended up being a steal. Time will tell, as usual.

It's also possible the last Wiz deal happens without the antitrust swirling over Google.

> FTC Chairman Ferguson and Omeed Assefi, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, announced on February 18, 2025, that the FTC and DOJ will continue to use the 2023 Merger Guidelines as the framework for their merger review process.

So I wouldn't count on it based on some generic "pro-business" position. Google is going to have to kiss the ring one way or another.

  - Google is up 5.2X - I am not sure how you got 152%
  - Apple is up 10X
  - Microsoft is up 8.25X
  - Netflix is up 7.45X
  - Amazon us up 7.28X
  - Facebook is up 6.27X

And for fun:

  - Nvidia is up 207X
  - Intel is down 12%
  - The S&P 500 is up 2.72X

That has nothing to do with whether Google has the ability to create new great products and it has failed miserably at that over the past decade.

Objectively speaking Google is one of the few companies that saw where the puck was headed and skated there. They built TensorFlow, they sponsored serious local AI research. Now they build their own in-house training and inference hardware. Relative to the struggling we see from the rest of FAANG, I would argue Google is perhaps the only successful competitor left. I despise their monopoly abuse of AdSense, but they're not going to be effectively prosecuted with protectionist American policy defending them. Google "won" the services sector and now everyone and their mother is butthurt.

Does Google have a better LLM based product than OpenAI’s ChatGPT? Well personally for my use case, NotebookLM is better for some things. But it isn’t a better product for most people.

Androids position is so bad in the market as far as convincing consumers with money to buy one, Google has to pay Apple $20B+ a year to be the default search engine. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google pays more to be the default search engine on Apple devices than Google makes in mobile for Android.

From a consumer standpoint, Android has seen declining market share in the US, the Nest acquisition is floundering, Stadia was a failure, Pixel ships about the same number in a year that Apple ships iPhone in a a couple of weeks, WearOS has gone nowhere, no real tablet strategy (I Chromebooks have been a success in education so that’s kind of a mitigating factor), their tv strategy has pivoted a half dozen times, their messaging app strategy is schizophrenic (they had 5 separate messaging apps simultaneously at one point), AI summaries for Google search are half baked.

On the business side, GCP is just pathetic. I don’t mean as far as technology. But their account management, enterprise sales team and customer service is lackluster. I mentioned in another comment that when I worked at AWS ProServe, we never considered them a serious competitor.

GSuite has gained some traction in smaller companies. But hasn’t made a dent in government and enterprise where the real money is.

Look at Microsoft and Apple’s product mix as far as successful profit generating products and compare that to Google’s.

In my book, Android doesn't count as a Google product, as it was a 2005 acquisition:

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-acquisition-...

YouTube and even AdSense were based on an acquisition.

Heck, Apple as we know it today was based largely on the Next acquisition.

Wiz is a SaaS b2b startup. Even on a forum for startups most people haven't heard of them.

Wiz reportedly has a revenue of 750m. It would take Google 30 years or more to break even on this deal. But like all bs startups Wiz will fade into irrelevancy 6 months after being acquired.

Google is getting completely scammed.

Like 32B is no small sum, and I don't really understand Wiz business (product yes, business and numbers much less).

A PE of 5 is not a growth stock - that’s the kind of PE you’d see on a barely surviving mid-cap in decline…. The combined PE of the S&P500 is in the low to mid 30s these days!

PE is not the same as PS (price to sales or revenue). Startups and growth companies are often valued by PS since they have revenue growth, but are often not yet turning a profit (making their PE < 0).

In fact price/revenue of sp500 is a disaster right now: 2.92.

That means that SP500 companies on average are worth 3 times their sales!

Even if they did, I just don't see the play.

Founders previously sold their security company to microsoft as well.

I loved the product when I used it (huge improvement over Nessus), and am immensely disappointed Google owns it as it means I’ll have to find something else going forward. This is the sort of acquisition a regulator should block, because Wiz really is best-in-class at what they do for every cloud they support, and customers benefit more from it being agnostic.

Sysdig, Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud, or a few others compete with Wiz's CNAPP offering. Wiz also strays into some SCA and SCA-alike tooling for containers, code or XDR with their CDR/XDR products log ingest and agents available for response/quarantine.

They also snapshot your disks, cloning them to Wiz accounts to provide secrets scanning / vuln scanning / etc against your infra.

These resulting risks / findings are scored and provided in their SAAS Wiz console via dashboards / APIs / integrations with remediation guidance.

I can see how that could be worth $32B.

A lot of cloud providers already have little hints like "hey - did you mean to create this account in God mode?" or "It is recommended not to create this god mode json key file" - Wiz is taking this to the next level of detail

Source: worked for a large enterprise company that used it, and I loved it. Phenomenal tool, will be a shame to see it die (or at least its non-GCP aspects wither and die) under Alphabet's ownership.

One exploit I remember Wiz finding was "ChaosDB". A flaw in Microsoft's Cosmos DB allowed anyone to use the default-enabled Jupyter Notebook to basically dump and modify anyone's databases, without authentication. Full admin access.

For Instagram and WhatsApp it was the user base and growth that was being bought, which is much harder to acquire than some random B2B saas security software.

Wiz is a vehicle created for the purpose of being acquired.

All they ever did was acquire a bunch of companies to be acquired as 1.

Anyone claiming they used their product, they're great, etc. are lying.

Revenue from Wiz's customers will not make back $32 billion dollars even in 30 years.

Wiz's technology is irrelevant. I think Google already scans for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. And can build similar for low millions of dollars.

How easy is this? Especially if you're doing it on an accelerated timeline, it seems like you'd have to pay above market to poach thousands of best-in-class engineers, and then you're stuck with higher salary expenses forever.

Citation please? Last layoff at Google of any significance was over 2 years ago in the post-pandemic cleanup era..

I think the other part of the equation missing is if Google did create their own Wiz, Wiz would still be on the market, and it'd be a bitter fight which they could very well lose.

What is hard about that is actually selling your product to customers, which Wiz managed to do in a way never seen before.

Google is arguably a thought leader in security, but from a revenue and customer base standpoint? Not even close.

- Businesses pay the cloud providers to allow them to use compute/disk/network

- Businesses pay to hire the engineers who can work on cloud

- Businesses pay to hire security engineers who can secure the applications in cloud

- Businesses pay to hire FinOps to optimize their cloud usage

- Businesses hire security companies to secure their cloud usage (e.g. Wiz was one such company)

- Now cloud provider has to acquire the security company to secure their own cloud?

Either I am too old, or there is something wrong here. Let's not forget that at the same time many big businesses do just fine by not using AWS/GCP/Azure.

No - this acquisition is about selling Wiz to cloud customers. Deploying on cloud securely is a solved problem if you set and follow good policies. Virtually nobody is doing this, ergo companies like Wiz that will tell you when you're doing something stupid.

Is it really that hard? like I listed out, it is definitely not cheap. There isn't a shortage of skilled engineers in IT after massive layoffs. What's the catch then?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiz_(company)#/media/File%3A...

The founders, who are now flush with cash, time and ideas; are quickly speedrunning the steps creating their previous company, in the same market, but now with more access to capital and employees from their previous company who would rather work for a startup than a large conglomerate, while fixing all the mistakes from their previous venture.

Anyway, Chomsky claims that there's 0 distinction between USA and Israel, so if you see it from that point of view, it makes little difference.

It's unclear to me what you're thinking besides the wish to troll.

Not supporting people who take part in the crime of persecution, is a nice side effect.

http://wiz.com/

Wiz will do it.

Always happy to see a good exit, good show.

I've worked with cloud for a long time. I sorta blame myself for not seeing the market for this and not starting up my own company. I was too busy messing with machine learning, but never going much beyond sentiment analysis. Had I also stayed on that path, and maybe had a few million dollars in startup Capital laying around I'd be a billionaire by now ( yes this is hyperbole).

Oh well, time to cry myself asleep as a forever middle class software engineer...

Mandiant wasn't/isn't "cloud security" - they're primarily security research, threat intel, and incident response. Completely different space, customer base, and product set.

Wiz was only formed to acquire other companies, then be acquired.

Nobody used their product.

All they ever did was acquire a bunch of companies to be acquired as 1.

Anyone claiming they used their product, they're great, etc. are lying.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/google-pa...

Wiz is much harder to understand.

Prior to this acquisition, Apple was determined to sue Android out of existence. They were on a rage-fueled mission to end a product they viewed as a copycat, and they knew Google didn't hold any patents to defend themselves.

When Google acquired Motorola's patents, the tables turned and it was Google that could end Apple or at least turn it into mutually assured destruction.

Those patents alone were worth a hundred billion for the headache they saved Google and the market position they opened up.

This was one of Google's smartest moves of all time.

To be clear: I am young and ignorant. I am trying to learn, not criticise

> Wiz has agreed to a termination fee of more than $3.2 billion, a source told Reuters, one of the highest fees in M&A history.

Not sure how they can afford this if it doesn't work.

Wow. I wonder how Google justified this acquisition. I fear they will eventually shutter this service, and likely without even pulling anything good into their own cloud offerings.

Every single devops person who can push a CL to staging (that may not get properly reviewed)? Every marketing whiz who is using a dataviz tool against a cloud storage bucket you didn't even know existed? Every support engineer who is on-call at 2:#0am and can fix a customer's problem with one tiny IAM change?

That being said, one of the reasons these things sell is that the majority of people sitting behind computers in large enterprises absolutely DO NOT have any idea what they were doing.

Once you get to a certain scale, the idea that you can "just be competent" and maintain high standards and configure your boxes the right way the first time every time btecomes logistically impossible.

Liability and insurance also is a big concern for large companies. The ability to blame somebody else for your security failings and check off all the silly boxes is pretty valuable. I'm sure consumer windows antivirus software would become a big hit again if you were for all intents and purposes being legally strong armed into purchasing it.

Whoever owns Wiz obtains read only access to large company and government cloud networks. Even in the Wiz outpost model where the scanning engine is deployed into the user's own cloud network, results from scans are sent back to Wiz Cloud, and this includes sensitive information such as "Installed packages, Exposed secrets, Malware detection".[1] For an example real world deployment, GitLab SaaS public documentation expects the "Wiz Runtime Sensor" to be installed in every container.[2] This Wiz software requires highly elevated privileges to a level that the GitLab security risk assessment only briefly describes.[3]

The data Wiz collects on customers appears to allow answering of queries such as:

1. Which containers of government agencies in country X have the xz-utils library installed? Of these containers, what other software is installed alongside? How many of these containers are exposed to the Internet, directly or indirectly?

2. Which government agencies in country X have a publicly exposed service vulnerable to CVE-20xx-xxxx?

3. For top 200 companies, plot the popularity of AWS or Azure service ACME123 over the past 12 months compared to competing Google service ACME456.

Aside from security risks of having sensitive information of entire governments or large organisations hoovered up by Wiz, use of the "Wiz Runtime Sensor" also includes the risk of an incident similar to the failed CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor update of 2024.

The criticisms above are not specific to Wiz. There are many other competing products/services with similarly poor architectures and lack of protection of sensitive IT system information of governments and large organisations.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/architecture/partners/id-prioritize...

[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/readiness/-/tree/mast...

[3] https://github.com/wiz-sec/charts/blob/master/wiz-sensor/tem...

https://www.financialpipeline.com/financial-scams-the-too-cr...

Usability of Wiz and the ability to adapt it is so much better. Everyone can get a seat without extra costs, enabling shift-left for the dev teams. Projects make sure they only see what they need to see.

The query engine is top. There are very good presets. Create Boards to share custom queries with the teams.

Compliance frameworks are available. You could inspect the rules, they are written in OPA rego and you could add your own rules.

Cloudtrail search is also a lot better than the one aws is providing.

I could go on and on and on .. this solution has so many powerful features.

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.

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, Wiz is in the conversation.

"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."

Just because your ignorant about significant portions of the tech industry doesn't mean you need to be dismissive.

The company was only formed to acquire others then be acquired.

You never used their product you piece of shit liar xD

Wiz was only formed to acquire other companies then be acquired.

You can piece it together from different comments at this point.

> Curiosity is a great sin

Curiosity has saved my ass more times than I can count. If you don't want to tell, that's okay. Just say that.

The company was only formed to acquire other companies, then be acquired.

Nobody used their product.

Fucking liars on this website xD

The article says:

> The price tag is much higher than the roughly $23 billion Google had offered for Wiz last year before antitrust worries forced the startup to shelve the deal.

> Wall Street is optimistic that the Trump administration would drop some antitrust policies

Is that it? It's crazy to announce the deal before there's any actual policy changes. Why the rush? It's not like someone is outbidding them here.

> The price tag is much higher than the roughly $23 billion Google had offered for Wiz last year before antitrust worries forced the startup to shelve the deal. ... A harsh regulatory environment in 2024 had made it difficult for many firms to push through large deals, but Wall Street is optimistic that the Trump administration would drop some antitrust policies.

Wiz was only formed to acquire other companies then be acquired.

This zionist is lying, and never used their product.

So HN is just full of zioscum liars or what?

Sherlocking is obviously the risk.

Currently, Crowdstrike, Zscaler and other solutions compete in a similar space than Wiz.

Google likely believes if can offer Wiz sec products bundled with Google Cloud. It isn't a terrible idea.

But Wiz itself works on multiple clouds, so it seems that Google can also grow it on their own.

Cloud security companies are growing a lot, and might be a growth lever for Alphabet, as its other businesses' revenue growth are slowing down.

My assumption is that this will actually make it easier for Crowdstrike and Zscaler to keep their market share, as they are pure-play companies on Cloud security and Alphabet has too many businesses to manage.

For me, it looks overpriced. Wiz has been growing a lot, but under Alphabet it might not perform as well as it did.

The big winners are the founders and whoever owned Wiz options.

ZS specializes in SSE/SASE - and does really well in that segment.

Or rather, kind of weird to be identifying people with their governments, and to do this only for Jews.

As for the Nazis, the ADL said Elon Musk's Sieg Hiel at the inauguration was totally OK and cool (because he supports Israel).

Regardless, do you want us to think that it's fine for the Poles to have Poland, the English to have England, the Castilians/Basques/Catalans/etc to have Spain, etc, but it's somehow wrong for the Jews to have a country?

Would you have preferred they remained scattered across the globe to be at the whims of the majority Christian and Muslim populations in other countries? Historically that arrangement always ended up very badly for the Jews. I'm old enough to remember a time when western leftists saw eye to eye with the Jews about this, rather than take the side of fundamentalist dictatorships and radical Islamists.

I wouldn't be surprised if you consider yourself a progressive, but the comments you posted on this thread clearly show your biases and bigotry. Be better.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ethnic_an...

Why is it fine with you to annihilate the palestinians to make space for the rather antisemitic project to drive jews out of their homelands? The british antisemitic colonialists didn't care, of course, they just wanted the jews out of Europe. Same goes for evangelical christian zionists, that also commonly see it as a perk that muslims die, and don't consider the much older christian communities in Palestine to be real christians. Where do you come from when you join this pretty distasteful movement?

As for "diverse" in Israel, there's a lot of state persecution of minorities, on racial, ethnic as well as religious grounds. Political minorities are also persecuted, you might even get harassed by the state for putting likes on other people's defense of international law on social media, and politicians like Ofer Cassif are constantly harassed and threatened by attempts to bar him from the knesset.

As for "radical Islamists", the israeli establishment is rather cosy with the genocidal and very islamist regime in the UAE. They're also cosy with european fascists and antisemites, because their interests align with zionist ideology, for example expulsion of jews from Europe and the eradication of "weak" yiddisch speaking diaspora jews and related historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust.

Against this backdrop and the ongoing genocide and several occupations I find it surprising that a global corporation decides to invest in israeli business on the scale of tens of billions of dollars.

Israel does not represent the jews or judaism, and it is antisemitic to claim otherwise.

If 75% of Israel’s population are jews, then who do you refer to, when you identify the people of Israel with their government? Do you mean the Arabs, the Druze and the Samaritans? Probably not.

I also think you mean israeli palestinians, not "Arabs", which is a slur in everyday israeli discourse. It's a society with the informal slogan 'death to arabs', as you probably know.

Most israeli jews agree with apartheid and the genocidal politics of the state they live under. There are regular polls that show this, e.g. from the Israel Democracy Institute. Very few take action against the state on this issue, and the large anti-Bibi protests are general opposition protests, they basically want a deal to get hostages and prisoners out, and then resumed genocide, i.e. the line of the parliamentary opposition.

You'll come across the slogan a lot if you start to consume israeli mass media.

That aside, it also seems like it might be a commercial liability, since they do business and recruit globally.

At least you're consistent.

Everyone should Google what blood libel means xD

Are you a christian zionist?

This isn't a normal company, just like every Israeli security "startup" with founders coming from idf intelligence units.

Even ignoring this, 32b for such a company just doesn't make sense.

It might sound weird to people from the US and many other western nations. Most people there aren't concerned with serving in the military - they either leave it to working class folks to serve, or they don't really have any neighboring enemies.

The Israelis aren't as privileged unfortunately. Israel requires all its citizens to serve so that its military is large enough and strong enough to defend against attacks from the many regressive and murderous regimes that surround it, or even better, deter them from even trying to attack.

At least one of the founders did the Talpiot program, so clearly the rest of them don't have a problem with that.

It's a military academy program deeply integrated into the research and development of the IDF and israeli military industry. It's where you go if you're really bright and really loyal to the genocidal aspects of israeli society and want to spend six years devoted to that.

recently i have been meeting more and more people whose entire vocabulary seem to be hyperboles and are only capable of black and white thinking

The israeli political establishment commonly declares genocidal intent against the palestinians, and uses military, sexual, reproductive and other means, including starvation, to realise this intent. This isn't really something to discuss, the reader can just go search for video clips with threats and Amalek rhetoric and how perpetrators of heinous crimes are paraded in israeli television. Whether it will hold in court is uncertain, in part because international law is not just a legal matter.

Buying a corporation that has it's technical division under such a regime seems like a bad idea to me, and I would also find the founders history with that state quite worrying.

If what I write incite hatred towards the palestinians in you, that's a you problem and you should probably seek out professional help with that.

"IHL prohibits attacks that may be expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. In the conduct of hostilities, causing incidental harm to civilians and civilian objects is often unavoidable." – Hamas leadership has planned and is planning attacks on Israeli civilians and destroying the Hamas leadership and militants is of a concrete and direct military advantage.

You should seek out palestinian voices that are interested in peace and life, not a death cult. To call the Hamas leadership "legitimate resistance to occupation" is just sick. They are bathing in luxury while Gazans die. They do not let the population to use their tunnels as bomb shelters. They sell the free humanitarian aid to extremely poor people, forcing the family members to sacrifice life and go join hamas, cause obviously that’s the only source of cash in the strip. You must be hating gazans even more than you hate jews, actually.

Do you get payed for hasbara or do you volunteer for some other reason?

Only a few countries consider Hamas to be a terrorist organisation. It's unlikely Bibi does, since he got Qatar to give him money in suitcases to drive into the Gaza strip, because banks didn't want to touch it due to the risk of sanctions. At the time he didn't think he could get away with genocide, but he likely does now.

There is nothing the armed wings of Hamas, PIJ, PFLP and so on has done or could do in the short to medium term that comes even close to what Israel is doing and has been doing for a very long time. You do not care about international humanitarian law or human life.

I've been looking at footage of maimed small children more or less daily for more than a year. Of course I feel hatred, as would any sane person. The difference between you and me is that I would like to see justice, I would like the perpetrators to be brought to the Hague and given due process, while you spread misinformation in the service of heinous crimes to help facilitate genocide and apartheid.

It is a tragic situation where on both sides people lost families and feeling of safety, yet your concentration on hate doesn’t let you see the complexity and the fact that there are two sides to this conflict. You know nothing about me and what I would like to see.

As I said, there is a big difference between labeling the whole nation genocidal, especially ones who protect their families and criticizing government, specific IDF conduct – you are making hateful generalizations that aren’t going to bring any justice to anyone. You are only fueling hate based on lies.

I disengage. You are lying and your hatred has consumed you.

I don't know where you live, but he lives in a country that's surrounded by theocratic dictatorships, failed states, and Islamist terrorists who livestream murders and kidnappings.

His choice seems perfectly rational to me.

This guy isn't a normal innocent civilian, that's my point.

It's really interesting to see these small mask-off moments when relatively veteran HN users allow themselves to indulge in such obvious bigotry as this comment.

Weird how you only really see this happening when the post has some relation to the Jewish state.

Apparently it's a mask off moment to notice these things? Or maybe you should examine why you think they're normal.

The Assad regime clinged to power in part in the way it did because it was what Israel preferred, israeli elites have been very afraid of what would follow the fall of Assad, which is likely why they've bombed Syria more or less constantly since then and occupies a large portion of the country. In the West many people believe the Assad dynasty to have been a clean iranian asset, but this isn't true. Bashar had good relations with security services in many other countries, and was one recipient of people collected by the US for torture during the so called War on Terror. Besides Beirut and possibly Amman it's likely Damascus was the most important spy hub in the region.

The fate of Syria is an enormous tragedy, that could likely have been avoided.

It is antisemitic to equate 'the jews' with zionism and the state of Israel.

Self reflection is great, and also is greatly missing from how you describe the palestinians. The palestinians don’t have agency in your view, and are only victims which is simply not the case.

The fact the jews are free to speak what they think (unlike majority of palestinians) is great, however one jew’s opinion doesn’t deny the opinion of majority of jews – that’s pretty easy. And your accusations of genocide and hateful intent on the side of all israelis (including these who go to IDF to protect their families), and claims of "shooting children" intentionally are all simply showing the fact that you are an antisemite, and majority of jews will feel the same way, no matter how many exceptions, Finkelsteins, or Shamirs you will find.

Now you've just picked an hasbara template at random.

There are polls about this that you could easily look up. Is your position that if most Israelis affirmatively support atrocities like this, the rest of the world should just pretend like we never saw that?

> America has killed at least 100x more civilians than Israel has

These aren't mutually exclusive. Israel is one of America's proxies. I'd support the international community putting sanctions on the US to put a stop to these things, but unfortunately it's not likely to happen because the US is the world's largest superpower and controls the global reserve currency, so it can operate with a degree of impunity. Is that a good situation, that you want to replicate around the world?

> no one on his right mind would demonize ordinary Americans

When the overwhelming majority of a country supports committing atrocities, it's not "demonizing" them to point that out.

> to be persecuted everywhere they step on earth.

Apparently it's "persecution" when people say that enthusiastically participating in a genocidal ethno-state's secret police means your company shouldn't get 32 billion dollars.

If the world should generalize over entire populations groups according to some poll then it should at least be consistent and not do it only to Israelis. If I find a poll that shows most Palestinians support October 7th would you immediately denounce every Gazan you talk to? It's also quite obvious many Gazans agreed not only with October 7th but also with the subsequent treatment of the Israeli hostages (which is a type of long lasting torture). Most of these hostages were/are simply kidnapped civilians, the ones you talk about in Sdei Teiman were most likely Hamas fighters connected to extreme cases of violence and terrorism. So there's more nuance here than you make it out to be. I personally think if anyone sexually abused them they should be thrown in jail but I can see why many Israelis have their hearts filled with hatred toward Hamas fighters. It's the job of the state to maintain rule of law.

It is telling that your fantasy about "Hamas fighters connected to extreme cases of violence and terrorism" helps you accept and tolerate systematic sexual abuse of palestinian men, but you don't draw similar conclusions from the actual, real, bombing of small children starving in haphazard tents. 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.

The reason most jewish israelis are fine with the crimes their state is committing is not the palestinians themselves, which have a right to resist the occupation violently.

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 have much degraded capacity which is probably a good thing for Israeli civilians. If the Palestinian had a greater capacity to kill on October 7th they would have used it.

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 the Nova festival because they couldn't find the way to a military base.

It is unknown how many of those 1200 were killed by friendly fire. From widely circulated photos it has to be a rather large portion, and you also fail to mention that a lot of those people were soldiers and other combatants.

It's not a war, it's a genocidal occupation that is met with puny resistance. You should stop lying and get help to leave zionism.

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.

The puny resistance with Iranian and Qatari support? Tens of thousands of rockets and drones are "puny"?

> “We have local factories for everything, for rockets with ranges of 250 km, for 160 km, 80km, and 10 km. We have factories for mortars and their shells. … We have factories for Kalashnikovs (rifles) and their bullets. We’re manufacturing the bullets with permission from the Russians. We’re building it in Gaza,” Ali Baraka, head of Hamas National Relations Abroad, is quoted as saying.

You should stop lying and stop the hate against a people who defend themselves.

Yes. It's puny.

It's not defense when you're the aggressor.

They enlist because they understand that, Israel being such a small country won't exist without an army. Now you may not care, or even endorse such a development. But you can't blame someone who lived there all their lives and has families and friends all over the country to think and act the same.

There is very little complexity to the "conflict". A political movement supported by antisemites wanting to get rid of jews at home established a state through displacement and eradication of the indigenous population. This state has continued applying these kinds of policies to the indigenous population and neighbouring states, and is dependent on foreign aid and the atrocious pillage of other countries, e.g. to support israeli diamond exports.

After the second world war there was an informal consensus that states that participate in genocide do not deserve sovereignty, a position that has since been eroded, in part by the main supplier of the israeli occupation. I understand how people that grow up in fiercely chauvinist and expansionist societies that are groomed since preschool to participate in military apartheid activities have trouble resisting these, which is why I don't believe israeli society can be a part of the solution to its occupation in the short term.

But let's get one thing straight: calling the Arabs in Israel/Palestine "indigenous" while dismissing the Jewish people’s claim to that land is laughable. The very name "Jew" comes from Judea—this same strip of land-where Jewish history stretches back millennia. I’m not saying Arab families who lived there never had rights; of course, they deserve their own country too. But the idea that they’re the only "indigenous" group is just another cheap piece of propaganda, right up there with labeling the whole situation as "genocide" or "apartheid". People have moved in and out of Israel/Judea for centuries. Plenty of folks calling themselves Palestinian today came around the same time as the Zionists or later-just look at the family names that point to places like Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond Al-Baghdadi, Al-Masri (the Egyptian), Halabi (Haleb = Allepo, Syria), Hourani (from Houran in southern Syria), Tzurani (from Tyre in southern Lebanon), Hijazi (from the Hijaz province of the Arabian peninsula), Mughrabi (from the Maghreb). Hell, Arafat was born in Egypt.

My basic point is this: both sides do actually have claims. But one side made it pretty clear they weren’t interested in compromise and resorted to terror against civilians, starting way back in the ‘60s. Naturally, the other side fought back, and things escalated.

As for calling Israeli society "chauvinist", give me a break. Israel had a female prime minister in the ’70s, has had women on its Supreme Court since forever, and meanwhile the U.S. is still waiting on its first female president. So, yeah-save the grandstanding about "chauvinism". It’s not as black-and-white as you’re painting it, and if you’re going to throw punches, don’t whine when you get punched back.

>> peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples

> Several states do not recognize indigenous ethnic minorities within their territories as being indigenous peoples, and simply refer to them as ethnic minorities. Many of these ethnic minorities are marginalized from the majority ethnic population in relative social, economic and political performance measures, and their indigenous rights are poorly protected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Rights_of_I...

Note that Israel merely abstained from voting on the latter, rather then voting against like Canada, The US and Australia did (while 143 voted in favor).

The case here is pretty clear cut. By most measures which actually matter for the rights of indigenous people, Palestinians are indigenous to Palestine, while most Israelis are settlers, or close descendants of settlers who gained control over the lands through conquest and colonization.

It is in fact very reasonable to dismiss the (European) Jewish people’s claim to the land if we are talking about legal claims to indigenous peoples. Even though no clear definition has been widely adopted (perhaps for the better) most of the umbrella terms capture Palestinians, and hardly any captures Israelis. Denying the Palestinian claims to their indigenous lands is very much the behavior that the Decleration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples sought to stop.

It follows from this view that the historical jews were weak, impure due to assimilation, 'freyers', which is why they were persecuted and subjected to genocide, and the new, zionist, jew is strong, muscular and will always make someone else the 'freyer'. And, as many zionists see it, will also be on the frontlines in the final struggle of the endtimes, where they will absorb the brunt of the violence and then convert to protestant christianity if they survive.

If you are israeli and support the state of Israel, well, yeah, then I think people ought to try and make you uncomfortable until you stop.

The palestinian indigeneity is much broader than the arabic language. There is no "Jewish people's claim", there is a zionist claim, i.e. a claim from a movement that mostly consists of christians, unless enough hindus have come to support it to outnumber them. Most of the foreign funding would still be from christians, I think. Either way, the territorial claims have little basis in either history or religion, it's an entirely modern idea that fused british and zionist colonial ambitions in the region with antisemitism, and later was inherited by the US.

You have a very colonial outlook, by the way. You look at this and think of people as "Arab", as if the people displaced by Israel that got their homes and homelands eradicated would be the same as people in Morocco or Sudan. It's fine to just drive them away and murder them, because something something Judea, and the empire needs a military presence to offset challenges to its oil extraction.

The zionists brought terrorism to the region and invented parts of modern terrorist tactics, things like market bombings. Palestinians have compromised, while the state of Israel has refused to and systematically murders its negotiating partners and attacks other neighbouring countries. The palestinians got nothing for their compromises, while Hamas has had some success with armed resistance, which, under occupation, is a right.

Israel mainly attacks palestinian civilians, while palestinian militants have for decades tried to avoid civilian harm. This is why the suicide bombings stopped, for example. Israel is also not a democracy, and is illegitimate on this fact alone.

I think the US is severely chauvinist as well. That "female prime minister" infamously said that she could never forgive the palestinians for resisting displacement and murder, and thus "force" the zionists to murder palestinian children.

The zionist occupations are atrocious and criminal. This isn't a grey zone, it's clear from international law and basic morality. You don't get to eradicate people and societies in this way. It was wrong when the russians did it to the circassians, it's wrong when christians and jews do it to the palestinians and lebanese. There are no excuses, and can be no excuses.

Second, saying there’s "no Jewish claim" to the land is straight-up ignorance. There is actually "Jewish claim", you just are not familiar with it. Jews have prayed in the direction of Jerusalem for thousands of years, many prayrs have a part about the return to Israeli homeland (here is one example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Shana_Haba%27ah). It’s part of the jewish daily practice, woven into the very fabric of jewish identity. Meanwhile, Muslims face Mecca—not Jerusalem. Deny it all you want, but the Jewish connection to this place is ancient, tangible, and undeniable.

And let’s talk about your so-called "colonial outlook." Do you even realize Palestinians self-identify as Arabs? the Middle East is historically tribal and ethnic in its identification. This isn’t some "Western" lens; it’s how people in the region actually see themselves. Ironically, you’re the one imposing a worldview that simplifies everyone into a one-size-fits-all label, acting like it’s morally superior to note these distinctions.

Finally, about this "occupation" nonsense: the land in question was under British control—not owned by any Palestinian state—before Israel’s establishment. There was a U.N. partition plan, one side accepted it, the other side went to war and lost. That’s not some mythical, twisted story—it’s documented history. If you start a war and lose, don’t be shocked that you don’t get to dictate the terms afterward.

Honestly, the sheer amount of mental gymnastics required to frame Israel as pure evil while ignoring the endless terror attacks and outright massacres by Palestinian militant groups is staggering. You’re the one excusing atrocities by claiming they’re a "right" under occupation. It’s as if civilian lives only matter when you they are on your side of the political divide

In total 364 corpses were found, including cops and irregular combatants and so on. It's unknown how many of those were Hellfire:d, likely a rather large portion judging from the photos of the aftermath where you can see pretty much every car at the location having been blown up by helicopter.

At the very least it was nothing like the deep cruelty and genocidal mania of the occupation forces. They use snipers to systematically target small children, as you should know.

Palestinians commonly ask 'where are the arabs?' when they're crying and desperate in the aftermath of some israeli atrocity. It is because there is very little community among the arab populations in the Middle East that has allowed for Iran to help supply and train armed resistance groups in Palestine. Palestinians know this better than you or I do.

Last summer the ICJ published their considerations regarding the occupation and deemed it illegal and demanded that it ends immediately. A year ago they found it plausible that Israel is committing genocide and ordered the state to stop with possibly genocidal actions. Consistently and regularly israeli pundits and politicians are confessing to genocide on national television, the Internet and so on. Here's the defense minister in a recent speech:

"Residents of Gaza, this is your final warning. The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza, and the second Sinwar will bring upon it total ruin. The Israeli Air Force's attack against Hamas terrorists was only the first step. What follows will be far harsher, and you will bear the full cost.

Evacuation of the population from combat zones will soon resume. If all Israeli hostages are not released and Hamas is not kicked out of Gaza, Israel will act with force you have not known before.

Take the advice of the U.S. President: return the hostages and kick out Hamas, and new options will open up for you—including relocation to other parts of the world for those who choose. The alternative is destruction and total devastation."

This isn't aimed solely at the palestinians, Israel is doing the same in Lebanon, where they destroy crops and forests with illegal weapons like phosphor bombs, and they systematically destroy homes, historical monuments and infrastructure. They also occupy lebanese territory, and they occupy Syrian territory. Currently they are also in breach of the peace agreement with Egypt. It is a criminal, expansionist state. This is surely evil. If it's pure evil? I don't know, don't care, that difference doesn't mean anything to me.

Here is two: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/toi-original/watc...

Should I go on? There are so many... I think it holds water pretty well, doesn't it?

I've also explained that this event was unorganised and spontaneous, it wasn't an organised resistance activity such as I meant above.

To me this material prompts the wish for justice, with due process and so on, but you apparently believe it excuses occupation and genocide. I don't think we'll reach common ground here, in part because you also seem to think it should be fine to go on a molly roll next to a concentration camp and not risk harm.

Check how does "concentration camp" look before Hamas started a war at expense of the peaceful population on both sides. There are many "Before October 7" videos on there, all with timestamps and sources from clips that Gazans publish themselves. Luxury villas, luxury cars, cute restaurants and good life all around. Also very sick children were routinly treated in Israeli hospitals for free. The main obstacle for poor Gazans was Hamas and their governing. Hamas also managed to smuggle enough concrete to build a tunnel system bigger than NY subway, instead of pumping these resources into Gazan society.

I don’t think you realize just how hateful your post actually is. You are trying to paint a picture of victims of genocide that somehow deserved the horrors done against them, or at best denies the very real horrors another state is inflicting upon them.

This kind of speech has no place on a tech forum.

let me ask this - are you from the region? Have you been to middle east?

After months and years of the Khmer Rouge doing the Cambodian Genocide, and after most international experts and commentators (except Noam Chomsky for some reason) concluded that the Cambodian genocide was in fact a genocide. Non-south-east Asians were still allowed to hold opinion on it. And further more, if somebody (like Noam Chomsky) would be spewing apologia for the Cambodian genocide, more people than just South-east Asians were allowed to call it out as such.

Edit: Attaching the relevant Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial

Now I live around Palestinians, I have spoken with Palestinian refugees, both in Iceland and the USA. I have attended lectures from Palestinians, I follow Palestinians on social media (both the diaspora, from Gaza, West-Bank, and East Jerusalem). And my interaction with them paints a very different picture than you. The Palestinians I have spoken to don care about Hamas, they may even support Hamas, their primary concern is the Israeli occupation, and sometimes the Israeli settler-colonial national psyche (i.e. Zionism). They are way more pissed at the Israeli government, the behavior it has normalized, the support it gets from Israeli citizens, and the complicity from both Western countries, but especially the inactivity of other Arab countries. They may bring up religious settlers, but that would just be one example of a much larger list of the systemic oppression they experience. They may bring up Hamas, but that is getting into the nitty grit of Palestine politics, they are actually more likely to criticize Palestinian Authority than Hamas.

Now my experience in interacting with Palestinians is probably very skewed to the left. I meet people in protests, on social media I follow gay’s rights activists, etc. So no doubt there are more conservative Palestinians who’s primary concern is Hamas and religious settlers, however I don’t think that makes my view ignorant nor hateful, just a little biased. However if I were to reduce the Palestinian opinion to only include the more simplistic and conservative one, that would not only make my option ignorant, but also perhaps a little racist.

it is indeed sad to hear that so few of the palestinians you have talked to are interested in peace and introspection. hamas is objectively the main reason for gazans’ misery and yet you didn’t meet the brave people who speak against them. anyway, it is also shunned in that community (especially expats who go to pro-palestinian demonstrations) to doubt the narrative of the pro-violence factions.

I can recommend you to seek such voices if you really want to know more and to actually contribute anything rational towards peaceful life in the region.

This is the kind of speech I was talking about. You are shifting the blame of the Gaza genocide, and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories away from the perpetrators of said genocide and occupation and onto the people who are fighting said occupation.

This is exactly the kind of speech which was very common in 19th and 20th century Europe and was used to justify their numerous genocide against indigenous peoples, who fell victims to European colonial conquest and oppression.

you can name many “indigenous people who fell victims” who butchered a thousand civilians and then took 250 hostage? what are you talking about with your inappropriate comparisons?

That is what you did 9 posts upthread. My claim of the Gaza genocide is well accepted among most genocide experts, several human rights organizations, international organizations, and several of the world’s government. The accusation of Oct 7 being a genocide is a fringe theory, which hardly anybody believes, but is used to justify the actual Gaza genocide. This is precisely why I jumped in this threat. To call out your speech for what it is.

> you can name many “indigenous people who fell victims” who butchered a thousand civilians and then took 250 hostage?

That specifically, no. Generally, yes. FLN in French Algeria comes quick to mind. They were probably as brutal and disregarding of civilian casualties among the French colonial settler population as Hamas is. ZANU and ZIPRA in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) is not hard to think of either. They regularly engaged in terrorist tactics. ZIPRA for example downed two civilian airplanes with the sole reason of killing as many white Rhodesian settlers as they could.

If we include general violence against the settler colonists done be the indigenous population outside of an organized group then the Haitian slave revolt is easy to mention. The revolting slaves made no distinction between civilians and military. There you actually had beheaded children which the freed slaves would put onto pikes and display to the french colonial soldiers.

If we include general colonies (not just settler colonies) the Viet Cong and the Kenyan Mau Mau come to mind. The Viet Cong would regularly bomb civilian targets and the Mau Mau did the infamous Lari Massacre where 74 (mostly) civilians were burned inside a locked hut.

All of these atrocities (except maybe the Hatian slave revolt) were than used to justify extreme violence against the indigenous population. The Mau Mau aftermath by british soldiers were particularly brutal, but still comes nowhere near the atrocities commit by the Israeli settler colonial army during the ongoing Gaza genocide.

Finally I would also like to call attention to the French Resistance. They didn’t come anywhere near Hamas in brutality against civilians. At worst they would throw grenades at Nazi soldiers in a public setting. But that didn’t stop the Nazi occupiers from calling them terrorist and use it to justify mass atrocities against the general French population.

At October 7th the Gaza strip was under occupation, with the population on the verge of starvation. That is not peaceful. It was also the deadliest year in a long time for palestinians in the occupied West Bank. An openly genocidal, kahanist-likudnik government had taken power in Israel.

Whatever "luxuries" got into the Gaza strip came through the smuggling network. And either way, armed resistance to occupation is a right. I'd argue it should be under apartheid as well.

and defense is a real right, unlike terrorism, if you pick violence, the other side will defend itself - so you are just glorifying more death, and are blind to your bloodlust, which is disgusting.