- Person
- Assaf Rappaport
- Lived
- b. 1983
- Field
- Cloud security
- From
- Israeli
The story
Assaf Rappaport, born in Israel in 1983, co-founded the cloud security company Adallom in 2012 and later led Microsoft's research and development centre in Israel. In January 2020 he and his former Adallom partners Ami Luttwak, Roy Reznik and Yinon Costica founded Wiz, with Rappaport as chief executive. Wiz's platform examines computing set-ups on services such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, looking for combinations of weaknesses that could let attackers take over systems or steal data.
Alongside its product, Wiz runs a research team that hunts for flaws in the cloud platforms themselves. In August 2021 it disclosed ChaosDB, a weakness in a notebook feature of Microsoft's Azure Cosmos DB database service. Wiz reported that the flaw could have given an attacker full access to the databases of several thousand Azure customers. Microsoft disabled the vulnerable feature within 48 hours of the report and later told more than 30 percent of Cosmos DB customers to change their access keys.
Weeks later Wiz revealed OMIGOD, four vulnerabilities in a little known software agent called Open Management Infrastructure that Azure quietly installed on many Linux virtual machines. Most customers did not know it was there. Wiz reported the flaws to Microsoft on 1 June 2021, and an official fix was published on 8 September 2021, with the vulnerabilities announced on 14 September. In a sample of Azure customers, Wiz found that more than 65 percent were exposed.
The team has since reported flaws in other services, including Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and IBM Cloud Databases for PostgreSQL, which were patched by the providers. In January 2025 it found a sensitive database belonging to the AI company DeepSeek left open on the internet.
Each of these discoveries affected not just Wiz's own clients but everyone using the platforms concerned. By finding the holes and telling the cloud providers, the researchers allowed them to be closed before criminals could exploit them at scale.
Why it matters
Problems Wiz researchers reported have been fixed by Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and others, protecting the data of large numbers of organisations and the people whose information they hold.
About Assaf Rappaport
Israeli entrepreneur who co-founded Adallom and Wiz, whose tools help thousands of organisations find and fix weaknesses in their cloud systems; Google bought Wiz for $32 billion in 2026.
More about Assaf Rappaport
Assaf Rappaport in the news
Sources
- Wiz, Inc. Wikipedia
- ChaosDB: How we hacked thousands of Azure customers' databases Wiz
- OMIGOD: Critical vulnerabilities in OMI affecting countless Azure customers Wiz
- Assaf Rappaport Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.