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China’s Already In—And We’re Still Using Signal?
- Lytical Ventures
- Apr 2
- 3 min read
Cyber Thoughts Newsletter
APRIL 2025
$32 Billion! With a "B". That's what Google agreed to pay for cybersecurity startup Wiz. Amazing.
Move over Slack, there’s a new sheriff in town. Wiz may be the fastest growing enterprise in history. Rumor has it that they grew ARR to over $500M in just 5 years. That's wild growth. This also marks Google's largest acquisition ever, and in cybersecurity no less.
It remains to be seen if this will be good for the security industry as a whole. The consolidation via Big Tech may either freeze out smaller players or, more likely, provide new areas to exploit and a healthy exit market. Time will tell. One thing is for certain—the Wiz acquisition ought to be seen as a harbinger of increasing demand for cybersecurity products over the next decade. Google doesn’t do the deal otherwise.
Signal Leakage -
We aren't going to go into the politics of Senior Government Officials discussing battle plans on their personal devices, that's not our beat. But we would like to talk about why Signal, while great, can't be trusted for these types of communications.
Ok sure, so it wasn’t ideal to add a reporter to their Super-Secret-Chat, but who among us hasn't added their boss to the thread where the team is discussing killing their pet project or left on screen sharing during a Zoom call while shopping for that ultra-rare Hummel figurine that will complete their collection?
Just us?!? Fine, be that way!
Signal uses end-to-end encryption to protect messages in transit. That’s great. But in order to be read, the encrypted messages must be decrypted once they reach a user’s phone (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read them…unless you’re a quantum computer, in which case we should talk). And therein lies the problem. If an attacker can hack your phone, they can read your messages. That's probably fine for the average user, but players like China and Russia are most certainly trying to hack our top officials.
In fact, from what we know about the Salt Typhoon hack, China has already succeeded in doing exactly that. For this reason alone, Signal is not a secure medium to discuss top secret information. Strictly from a security standpoint, it’s safe to assume that as long as top US officials use Signal to communicate, China will be following along.
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What We're Reading
Here's a curated list of things we found interesting.
Trump Cybersecurity Officials Are Stunned By Signal Leak
This is simply terrible operations-security and shouldn’t be tolerated. It puts lives at risk and is unacceptable.
The stunning news that a journalist was accidentally included on a Signal chat where Trump defense and intelligence officials including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth discussed U.S. military strikes in Yemen has shocked the cybersecurity community, including staff in Trump’s own administration.
Zero Day review – De Niro’s cyberhacking thriller is an astonishing amount of fun
This is just good fun. Also, De Niro’s first major TV role?!? How can that be?
The actor is in fine form in his first major TV role – as an ex-president trying to track down the source of a digital terrorist attack. Was it rogue hacktivists? The Russians? It’s preposterously entertaining either way
Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
AI models have been improving their performance at completing longer tasks, doubling at the rate of every 7 months. The key types of tasks they are doing are AI research, which implies that these effects will be compounding.
We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months.
Transactions
Deals that caught our eye.
Google’s $32 billion Wiz deal may signal a turning point for slow IPO, M&A markets
The search giant announced Tuesday it plans to buy the Israeli cybersecurity startup for $32 billion in its biggest acquisition ever. The deal came months after an initial $23 billion offer fell through and Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport touted plans for an initial public offering.
Podcasts
What we’re listening to.
Building the SOC of the Future – JP Bourget
What does a mature SecOps team look like? There is pressure to do more with less staff, increase efficiency and reduce costs. JP Bourget's experience has led him to believe that the answer isn't a tool upgrade, it's better planning, architecture, and process.
About Lytical
Lytical Ventures is a New York City-based venture firm investing in Corporate Intelligence, comprising cybersecurity, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. Lytical’s professionals have decades of experience in direct investing generally and in Corporate Intelligence specifically.