Afrasianet - Murtada Hussein - The $25 billion deal is the latest acquisition aimed at strengthening ties between the U.S. tech sector and Israeli intelligence.
Dropsite News publishes a report on the acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks for $25 billion, highlighting the deep ties between U.S. technology companies and Israel's intelligence unit 8200.
The following is the text of the report translated into Arabic:
In late July, U.S. cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks announced that it had acquired CyberArk, Israel's leading identity management and information security company, and paid a hefty $25 billion in cash and stock to buy the company. The operation is aimed at strengthening ties between Silicon Valley and Israel's security and intelligence services, as well as the potential to inject billions of dollars into the Israeli economy.
Palo Alto is one of the world's largest cybersecurity companies, providing infrastructure protection, protection software, and cloud security services to tens of thousands of companies globally. Udi Mokady, founder and CEO of CyberArk, is a graduate of Unit 8200, the elite signals intelligence unit of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate. The same is true of the four founders of Wiz, the Israeli cloud computing company that was recently acquired by Google for $32 billion, and the founder and chief technology officer of Palto Alto, Nir Zouk.
Over the past decade, Palo Alto has seen expansion through a series of high-profile acquisitions, at times paying billions of dollars to startups aiming to expand their cybersecurity offerings. About half of these operations involved companies with Israeli intelligence assets, raising concerns about access to the vast amounts of data around the world that the company is protecting. Palo Alto Networks did not respond to Dropsite's request for comment Issue.
Some of these acquired companies, including LightCyber, Dig Security, Talon Cybersecurity, Secdo, and Bridgecrew, were founded and managed by well-known former officers of Unit 8200. Other major acquisitions include Cyvera , Twistlock, and Puresec, whose founders are also members of the IDF's Cybersecurity, Intelligence, and Commando Units.
Paul Biggar, founder of tech startups CircleCI and Darklang and president of the activist group Tech for Palestine, said: "The acquisitions are a way to move people out of Unit 8200 in Israel and put them in influential positions in the U.S. tech sector. These companies handle their customers' data. If you're a bank and you use Palo Alto Networks, all of your customers' data and transactions go through servers controlled by spies or former spies."
As of June 2025, more than 1,400 former Israeli intelligence officers have joined the U.S. tech sector, including 900 from Unit 8,200 alone. The figure comes from a database of people who identify themselves on their LinkedIn profiles as former Israeli intelligence officers working in U.S. technology.
The database was compiled by an independent researcher who remained anonymous for personal security reasons, and named the Eagle Mission Impact Network.These 1,400 people are self-identified officers or reserve personnel working in Unit 8200, which is part of Israeli military intelligence and the IDF's Cyber Defense Directorate, and work in high- and mid-level engineering and security positions at major U.S. technology companies with offices in Israel, the United States, and Europe. Dropsite has verified a number of records in the database to ensure their authenticity.
The researcher pointed out that "this does not mean that everyone who served in the unit (8,200) Israeli spies seeks to send secret data to Tel Aviv. But this is a serious loophole: no one else has that much access to the US tech sector. "We are obsessed with Chinese interference in the technology sector and concerned about spy companies, but Israeli hacking is rarely mentioned."
One of the world's largest employers of Unit 8200 alumni is Microsoft, employing about 250 former officers in the unit, as well as a number of major multinational companies, including Nvidia, Meta, Google, Intel and AppleMany of them employ dozens of members of the unit. It was recently revealed that Microsoft and the leadership of Unit 8200 are working closely to create dedicated cloud services to store millions of private communications for Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. The company declined to comment on the matter.
Although the acquisition of CyberArk has been criticized by some investment analysts for its disproportionate price, coupled with a drop in the share price of Palo Alto Networks in the immediate aftermath of the deal, intelligence ties are not mentioned in public statements about the acquisition.
History of espionage
The presence of current or former foreign intelligence agents in key U.S. industrial sectors is a concern, given counterintelligence and industrial espionage threats. For decades, Israel has been a major counterintelligence threat in the United States, particularly with regard to the targeting of industrial and technical secrets.
In 2015, former U.S. intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was released from prison after serving a 30-year life sentence for espionage and providing top-secret U.S. intelligence to Israel. Following the end of his parole restrictions in 2020, Pollard, who was granted Israeli citizenship in prison and whose case has long been supported by pro-Israel groups and Israeli politicians, moved to Israel. Weeks after his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, where he was greeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally, Trump has issued a blanket pardon to Avim Sila, an Israeli spy and military officer who was accused of acting as Pollard's handler.
The Pollard case has strained relations between the United States and Israel. But accusations of espionage and industrial espionage have persisted. Last year, U.S. defense firm Conflict Kinetics filed a lawsuit accusing an Israeli Defense Ministry official of stealing trade secrets to create a shooting simulator to train its soldiers. The Israeli official, Daniel Goldfuss, was a researcher at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and is said to have promised the company that it would be able to enter into contracts with the Israeli military. Goldfuss was a commander in the Israeli army in Gaza.
"It is unlikely that we will allow any country, even an ally, so much access to our most sensitive sectors. It is also important to remember that both the CIA and the FBI publicly rank Israel as one of the most prominent counterintelligence threats, along with Russia, China, and Iran." He explained that a large number of individuals who were previously affiliated with Unit 8200 or other Israeli security services have begun removing information about their affiliations from their public social media profiles since October 7, 2023, saying, "It is remarkable how many people want to openly disclose their work for a foreign intelligence agency, and these are the only ones who have publicly shared information about their connections."
The relationship between Israeli intelligence and U.S. technology has been celebrated. A story in the Wall Street Journal in August 2024 praised the reality of the unit's growing influence in Silicon Valley, stating that "there are at least five tech companies founded by Unit 8200 alumni, which are publicly listed in the United States, with a total value of about $160 billion," and praised former officers in the specialized unit for their "high-pressure and immediate-minded culture."
The article noted that major venture capital firms in Silicon Valley such as Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital were hiring partners and buying companies created by people who worked at Unit 8200. Sequoia has recently come under scrutiny for policy statements made by a prominent partner, Sean Maguire, regarding Israel and topics related to U.S. domestic politics, including vociferous public defense of Israel's war on Gaza and condemnation of its critics, including New York mayoral candidate Zahran Mamdani, as "Islamists."
Begar described the actions of Sequoia, Greylock, Palo Alto Networks and other Silicon Valley companies as part of a political shift led by a network of closely connected individuals who have worked to reshape the ideological character of the sector. "American technology has turned to politics," he said. In the past, they built search engines and email, and now they sell AI to genocidal countries. There's a very strong network of people who believe in the same ideas, and they're using their influence to attract more people who share their views. That has a big impact on how these companies are doing right now."
"Similar values, strong cultures"
Unit 8200 has been an essential part of the Israeli military apparatus, including during the current genocide in the Gaza Strip. In addition to conducting electronic surveillance of communications, the unit has been involved in the creation of AI-generated targeting programs for use in Gaza, feeding targets to human operators to create what a former Israeli intelligence officer referred to as a "mass assassination factory," and at times approving the killing of hundreds of civilians in order to target a single individual allegedly a commander in the Gaza Strip. Hamas.
In addition to collaborating with tech giants to help carry out the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, Unit 8200 has also developed surveillance technologies to monitor and control West Bank residents, including the creation of large AI-based language models that have been trained on millions of conversations between Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories.
In its press release announcing the acquisition, Palo Alto highlighted the expected role CyberArc will play in developing its own AI-driven cybersecurity and identity management platforms, noting that the acquisition would "unite two security leaders with similar values, strong cultures, and talented teams."