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.

  • @[email protected]
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    371 month ago

    They should not be allowed to continue hoovering up companies. They have more than enough resources to break into new and existing markets from scratch. Allowing them to acquire additional companies and talent erodes competition.

  • @[email protected]
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    351 month ago

    Sounds like it’s time for congress to take discussion of dissolving Alphabet a lot more seriously.

    • Sabata
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      31 month ago

      Imagine how much google would have to bribe them to get out of that mess.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 month ago

        GOP is pretty cheap. DNC have to be corrupt from the start to even have a chance. So, either a little or enough to cover an entire election campaign for starters.

  • @[email protected]
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    161 month 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
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    161 month ago

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

    • @satanmat
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      161 month 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
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        41 month 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
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    131 month 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.

  • @Ok_imagination
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    51 month 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

    • partial_accumen
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      11 month ago

      Did you switch away from Terraform when IBM bought Hashicorp?

    • Resol van Lemmy
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      31 month ago

      Google had a product called Zeitgeist. Guess what, they killed it.

  • sylver_dragon
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    21 month 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.

  • @randon31415
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    1 month ago

    They are going to buy CNN business?

    Oh, wait…