Hundreds of Former Israeli Spies Are Working in Big Tech, Database Shows
A $25 billion deal is the latest acquisition to strengthen the link between the U.S. tech sector and Israeli intelligence.
READ IN APP The CyberArk Software Ltd. logo ion a smartphone with Palo Alto Networks in the background (Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images).
In late July, the U.S. cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks (PANW) announced that it had acquired the Israeli identity management and information security firm CyberArk, paying a staggering $25 billion dollars worth of cash and stock to purchase the firm. In addition to potentially injecting billions of dollars into the Israeli economy, Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition of CyberArk further strengthens the relationship between Silicon Valley and Israel’s security-intelligence apparatus.
Palo Alto is one of the world’s largest cybersecurity firms, and provides infrastructure protection, firewalls, and cloud security services to tens of thousands of companies internationally. Udi Mokady, CyberArk’s founder and executive chairman, is an alum of Unit 8200, the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate’s elite signals intelligence division. So are the four co-founders of Wiz: the Israeli cloud computing firm recently bought by Google for $32 billion. So, too, is Palo Alto’s Founder and Chief Technology Officer Nir Zuk.
Palo Alto has expanded through a spree of high-profile acquisitions over the past decade, paying sometimes up to billions of dollars for startups aimed at expanding its cybersecurity offerings. Nearly half of these have involved companies with origins in Israeli intelligence, raising concerns about access to the vast amounts of data around the world that the company is charged with protecting. Palo Alto Networks did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.
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Some of these purchased firms—LightCyber, Dig Security, Talon Cybersecurity, Secdo, and Bridgecrew—were founded and led by publicly identified Unit 8200 veterans. Other major acquisitions include Cyvera, Twistlock, and Puresec, whose founders also come from the Israeli Defense Forces’s “cyber, intelligence, and commando units.”
“These acquisitions are a way to take people from Unit 8200 in Israel, and bring them into influential positions in the U.S. tech industry,” said Paul Biggar, founder of the tech startups CircleCI and Darklang and head of the activist group Tech for Palestine. “These companies handle their customers' customer data. If you are a bank, and you are using Palo Alto Networks, the data about all your customers, and their transactions, are passing through servers that are controlled by spies, or former spies.”
As of June 2025, over 1,400 veterans of Israeli intelligence are now working in U.S. tech—with 900 of those coming from Unit 8200 alone. That number comes from a database of people who publicly identify themselves as being both former Israeli intelligence officers and holding a job in U.S. tech on their LinkedIn profiles.
The database was assembled by an independent researcher, who is remaining anonymous for personal security and has dubbed the database the “Eagle Mission” influence network. The 1,400 people are self-identified veterans or active reserve members of Unit 8200, Israeli military intelligence, and the IDF Cyber Defense Directorate working in senior and mid-level engineering and security roles at major U.S. tech firms with offices in Israel, the U.S., and Europe. Drop Site crosschecked many of the records in the database for accuracy.
“This does not mean that every person who served in Unit 8200 is an Israeli spy looking to send classified data back to Tel Aviv,” the researcher emphasized. “But it does create a serious vulnerability. No other country has this kind of access to the American tech sector. We obsess over Chinese involvement in the tech industry and worry about corporate espionage, but Israeli penetration rarely gets mentioned.”
The global tech giant Microsoft is one of the most prominent employers of Unit 8200 alumni, employing roughly 250 veterans of the unit, alongside other major multinational companies including Nvidia, Meta, Google, Intel, and Apple, many of whom employ dozens of individuals drawn from the unit. Microsoft was recently revealed to have closely collaborated with Unit 8200 leadership on the creation of cloud services intended to store millions of private communications of Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Microsoft declined to comment.
While the CyberArk acquisition deal drew criticism from some investment analysts due to the seemingly disproportionate price tag—with shares of Palo Alto Networks declining in the immediate aftermath—the intelligence ties were not mentioned in public statements about the acquisition.
A History of Spying
The presence of current or former intelligence agents from foreign countries in key industries in the U.S. is generally considered a source of concern due to counterintelligence and industrial espionage threats. For decades, Israel has been identified as a major counterintelligence threat in the U.S., particularly for the targeting of industrial and technical secrets.
In 2015, former American intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was released from prison after serving 30 years of a life sentence for spying and providing top-secret classified U.S. intelligence to Israel. After the end of his parole restrictions in 2020, Pollard, who was granted Israeli citizenship in prison, and whose cause had long been supported by pro-Israel groups and Israeli politicians, moved to Israel. Weeks after his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, where Pollard was personally greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, the Israeli spy and military officer who had been charged with working as Pollard’s handler.
The Pollard case strained U.S.-Israeli relations. But accusations of spying and industrial espionage have continued. Last year, U.S. defense company Conflict Kinetics filed a lawsuit accusing an Israeli Ministry of Defense official of stealing trade secrets to create a shooting simulator tool for training of its soldiers. The Israeli official, Daniel Goldfus, was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and allegedly promised the company that it could get contracts with the Israeli military. Goldfus has been serving as a commander in the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.
“Its unlikely that we would let any country, even an ally, have this level of access to our most sensitive industries. It’s also important to remember that both the CIA and FBI openly rank Israel among our top counterintelligence threats, alongside Russia, China, and Iran,” said the researcher, who added that many individuals formerly affiliated with Unit 8200 or other Israeli security agencies had begun scrubbing information about their affiliation from their public social media profiles since October 7, 2023. “It’s remarkable how many people openly are willing to identify as having worked for a foreign intelligence agency, and that is only the ones who have shared information about their connections publicly.”
Instead, the connections between Israeli intelligence and American tech have largely been celebrated. A story in the Wall Street Journal from August 2024 lauded the fact of the unit’s expanding influence in Silicon Valley, stating that “there are at least five tech companies started by Unit 8200 alumni publicly traded in the U.S., together worth around $160 billion,” and praising veterans of the specialized unit for their “high-pressure culture and on-the-spot thinking.”
The article noted that major Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital were hiring partners and buying companies built by founders with backgrounds in Unit 8200. Sequoia recently came under scrutiny for political statements made by a prominent partner, Shawn Maguire, regarding Israel and related subjects in U.S. domestic politics, including vociferous, public defenses of Israel’s war on Gaza and denunciations of its critics, including New York mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, as “Islamists.”
Biggar characterized the actions of Sequoia, Greylock, Palo Alto Networks, and other Silicon Valley firms as part of a political shift driven by an influence network of closely connected individuals that have worked to reshape the ideological character of the industry.
“U.S. tech has gone political. Once upon a time they made great search engines and email, and now they sell AI to genocidal countries,” Biggar said. “There is a very tight network of people who believe the same things, and use their influence to import more people who share their views. It affects very much how these companies now behave.”
“Similar Values, Strong Cultures”
Unit 8200 has been an integral 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 one former Israeli intelligence officer referred to as a “mass assassination factory,” sometimes approving the killing of hundreds of civilians in order to target a single individual alleged to be a Hamas commander.
In addition to its collaboration with tech giants to help carry out the current genocide in the Gaza Strip, Unit 8200 has also been developing surveillance technologies to monitor and control the population of the West Bank, including, most recently, the creation of AI-driven large language models trained on millions of conversations of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the territory.
In its press release announcing the acquisition, Palo Alto highlighted the expected role that CyberArk would play in developing its own AI-driven cybersecurity and identity-management platforms, stating the acquisition would, “unite two security leaders with similar values, strong cultures, and talented teams.”
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