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Comment by jckrichabdkejdb | Hacker News Reader

They've also been a nexus of cyber security: Palo Alto Networks, Checkpoint, Wiz, etc are all Israeli companies.

The Ones Who Sell The Panic Sell The Cure.

Which is surprising that these organizations have trust; like our employers probably wouldn't be comfortable shipping all their code to / embedding agents from cybersecurity firms in Russia

Palo Alto Networks is not an Israeli company. But it has acquired many Israeli companies

the founder is !

By that definition Tesla is a South African company.

The founder was former checkpoint engineer and unit 8200 in Israel. It isn't HQed in there but there are ties.

It's the same skill set, many acquire it via the IDF, so unsurprising.

Specifically Unit 8200, which really has no counterpart elsewhere in the world given Israel's mandatory universal conscription. Imagine if you could systematically screen every young adult in a country, identify those with the strongest math/quantitative skills or promising deep tech skills and divert them into one single security special ops org for several years. You'd get the concentration of skill that Unit 8200 has been producing.

I don't see why other countries couldn't do this? Doesn't Russia kinda do this as well? Its a matter of will.(Just my opinion).

Does Russia have mandatory *Universal* conscription? I didn't think they did. Maybe recently?

North Korea does this too, actually (and like Israel, for both genders). It's probably one of the significant reasons why NK has such a comparatively effective offensive cybersecurity group, despite how unlikely that would seem given their overall industrial capacity.

NK likely also gets a bit of a boost because of the extended length of mandatory service. Males on technical teams have to serve for 13 years.

Russia has historically not had mandatory universal conscription.

Palo Alto used booth babes in 2025. I have zero respect for them since that.

Are you saying there's no work for both babes either? What a dry market!

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