ISRAEL’S arms exports fell last year. Cutbacks in the defence budgets of many Western countries pushed the global sales of Israeli weapons systems down to $5.7 billion, $1 billion less than in 2013. Unexpectedly, another security-related industry took up the slack. For the first time, the country sold more cyber-wares than arms. According to figures published recently by the cyber-task-force in the prime minister’s office, in 2014 Israeli companies sold around $6 billion of internet-security software, equivalent to about a tenth of the entire worldwide sales of such stuff.
A big chunk of that came from Check Point, best known for its ZoneAlarm antivirus software for home computers, and a provider of a broad range of online-security products for business. Its revenues last year were $1.5 billion. But Israel is also producing lots of cyber-security startups. Last year eight of them were sold to foreign investors, for a total of $700m. In September CyberArk, which specialises in protecting firms against attackers who pose as system administrators and other insiders, had one of the year’s biggest IPOs on the American NASDAQ market, and its current...
from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1Iu8PsX
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