Expert Insights Cybersecurity Vendor News Recap: Top 5 Big Headlines This Week

Welcome to your quickfire recap of vendor news, M&As, investments, and controversies that have been making headlines this week.

Have any thoughts or stories to share? Get in touch! [email protected].

1. Why Wiz Turned Down $23 Billion USD From Google

Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, the leading cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), explained why they turned down a $23 billion offer from Google, last week.

Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Conference, Rappaport said Wiz aimed to continue to grow and reach $100 billion dollars in revenue, which he sees as possible due to the massive growth of the cloud security market.

“We believe it’s bigger, definitely bigger than endpoint, bigger than networks, so the opportunity to become a 100 plus billion-dollar company is there… If we do the right things, and we execute, it’s…in our hands,” he was quoted as saying.

Wiz launched in just 2020 and has had a stratospheric growth trajectory. It’s been privately valued at $12 billion and has raised over $1 billion dollars investment. Wiz was the fastest SaaS company ever to reach a $10 billion dollar valuation – and the platform is likely to continue to grow.

CNAPP solutions are cloud security tools that consolidate and evolve previous separate cloud security features. This includes cloud security posture management, workload protection, and entitlement management. They are also tightly integrated into the DevSecOps eco-system.

2. Customers reportedly ‘disgruntled’ following Broadcom’s VMWare Acquisition

Ars Technica reported last week that for some reseller partners prices have more than tripled, in some cases due to Broadcom consolidating VMWare’s solutions into two line items.

Customers ArsTechnica reported that: “unless you were using the entire VMware product line, a lot of companies were now forced to pay for things that they did not want or need.”

VMWare remains a market leader in virtualization and many enterprises are likely to stay with VMWare despite pricing changes and negative sentiment for some customers. As we have seen in its previous acquisitions, such as Symantec, Broadcom may focus growing the larger enterprise side of the market, rather than smaller customers.

It’s been over two years since chipmaker Broadcom announced they were buying virtualization and cloud infrastructure company VMWare, in a deal that closed at $69 billion.

It was widely reported that customers were wary of the deal even before it closed. Shortly after the deal was announced, analyst firms Gartner and S&P Global Market Intelligence offered ‘negative evaluations’ of the deal based on customer feedback.

However in June, a survey of over 300 director level IT workers found that 83% of VMWare customers with contracts expiring in June 2025 would be likely to ‘partially or fully’ stick with VMWare.

3. Sophos Details Evolving Chinese Hacking Tactics After Five Year Investigation

Sophos has outlined how Chinese hackers are becoming stealthier and evolving their threat tactics, reports Infosecurity Magazine.

Between December 2018 and November 2023, Sophos detected a shift from widespread attacks to more narrow targeting of high value organizations.

Sophos found that exploits developed by threat actors Volt Typhoon, APT31, and APT41/Winnti were shared with multi-Chinese state-sponsored groups.

Another key finding was that the groups were increasingly effective at hiding their attacks from immediate discovery, including blocking telemetry data on compromised devices being sent to Sophos.The analysis was conducted by Sophos, alongside other cybersecurity vendors, law enforcement, and government agencies. You can read the full report from Sophos here.

4. CrowdStrike To Acquire Adaptive Shield For Reported $300 Million

CrowdStrike announced an agreement to acquire Israeli SaaS security platform Adaptive Shield during Fal.Con Europe this week. SecurityWeek reports the deal is worth $300 million USD.

Adaptive Shield provides SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) and Identity Threat Protection And Response (ITPR), essentially meaning it protects SaaS-applications and protects both human and non-human identities. CrowdStrike outlined that their plan is to integrate Adaptive Shield’s technology into its Falcon platform.

“Adaptive Shield’s technology, when integrated with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, will deliver compelling value to organizations by proactively detecting and preventing modern cross-domain attacks spanning endpoint, cloud and SaaS applications,” CrowdStrike’s president, Micheal Sentonas wrote.

Read Next: Our guide to the top 7 ITPR solutions.

5. Embed Security Raises $6 Million In Funding

Finally, SecurityWeek reports that Embed Security has raised $6 Million USD in an early stage funding round led by the Paladin Capital Group.

Embed Security was founded in 2024 by Seth Summersett and Jeffrey Johns who previous had leadership roles at Google and Meta.

The company aims to help CISOs better manage alerts and false positives, using GenAI agents to generate faster and more reliable threat investigation.

“Overworked analysts are struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of threats. Our platform uses AI and other ML techniques to autonomously investigate alerts, determine real threats, and guide analysts on next steps,” Summersett said .

Since the general release of ChatGPT there has been widespread debate in the cybersecurity industry as how effectively GenAI could assist the SOC team. Many leading vendors have launched ‘AI Security Analyst’ tools that help analysts to respond to threats faster – such as SentinelOne’s Purple AI.

Organizations can request early access to the Embed Security platform via their website.

That’s all for this week! We’ll be back on Tuesday with our next news roundup.

Expert Insights Cybersecurity Resources