Google owner Alphabet is in advanced discussions to buy fast-growing cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23 billion, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN.

Google owner Alphabet is in advanced discussions to buy fast-growing cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23 billion, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN.

A takeover of Wiz, which makes cybersecurity software for cloud computing, would represent a major bet by Google on cybersecurity, marking the tech giant’s biggest-ever acquisition.

  • oxjox@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    Google owner Alphabet is in advanced discussions to buy fast-growing cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23 billion so they can kill off their largest hurdle to acquiring all of humanity’s personal data.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    111·
    5 months ago

    Not that I want this to happen, but cybersecurity is probably a far better investment than AI will ever be.

    • satanmat@lemmy.world
      10·
      5 months ago

      Internal security is almost always seen as a cost, rather than as an asset.

      So you frequently see a “we have a firewall; let’s cut those jobs and save the money “

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
        2·
        5 months ago

        It was more of a comment about how many millions they have wasted on AI with very little to show for it. At least they have a chance of better protecting themselves by acquiring this. They probably won’t, but it’s still more likely to help them out than what they gave to Reddit.

  • sandalbucket@lemmy.world
    6·
    5 months ago

    Wiz scans clouds for “vulnerabilities”, and sometimes provides remediation advice. For example, if a vm’s kernel is outdated, it might recommend “sudo dnf remove —purge kernel”. And yeah, there sure won’t be any vulnerabilities after that.

    It also complains about anything internet facing - including intentionally internet facing services - but that’s another rant for another time.

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    Can’t say I’m surprised. Been using Wiz for a short while and it really fills in a lot of gaps left by teams going to “The Cloud”. It seems like devs working in cloud environments all forgot that security is a thing and so we get an absolute shit-show of misconfigured containers, networks, K8s clusters, etc. Add to that Google, AWS and Azure all seeming to treat security as an afterthought as well, and organizations need a Wiz or something like it to trawl through the cesspool and point out, “hey, maybe you should update that Wordpress plugin with several known RCE CVEs.”

    The long and short of the current state of cloud security reminds me an awful lot of the early 2000’s view of on-prem security. People just throw up firewalls (excuse me, VPS configurations) and call it a day. Once the attack gets past the edge (and they always get past the edge) visibility and response actions fall off a cliff. We’re at a point where we need EDR and NDR for the cloud; but, there isn’t much in that space yet. Wiz is one of the options and I can see Google wanting to own a piece of that growing pie.

  • Ok_imagination@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 months ago

    From what we’ve seen with Wiz. It’s hard to beat their cloud and container security. I hope this sell doesn’t go through, we’ll likely have to switch from them as a Microsoft shop