Labs is the research arm of Thinkst but research has always been a key part of our company culture. All Thinksters are encouraged to work with Labs on longer term projects. These become that Thinkster’s “day job” for a while. (These are intended both for individual growth, and to stretch ourselves into new areas: They don’t have to be related to Canary or security). I took a brief hiatus from the engineering team to explore a computer vision project: CourtVision. …
Year: 2023
Introduction We spend huge amounts of time sweating the details of our products. We want to remove all the friction we can from using them and want to make sure we never leave our users confused. To get this right, we do a bunch of things: we use simple language, we make extensive use of context-sensitive help and where it’s needed, we nudge users with illustrative examples. Recently we bumped into something that made us rethink our use of examples. Background …
Introduction Today we’re open-sourcing a research project from Labs, ZipPy, a very fast LLM text detection tool. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (without cellphone coverage), you’ve heard of how generative AI large language models (LLMs) are the “next big thing”. Hardly a day goes by without seeing a breathless article on how LLMs are either going to remake humanity, or bring upon its demise; this post is neither, while we think there are some neat applications for LLMs, …
This week we are super excited to release the latest addition to our lineup of Thinkst Canary platforms: Tailscale. Background We’ve always made sure that deploying Canaries is absurdly quick and painless. It’s why you can add a hardware Canary to your network just by plugging it in and why most customers end up re-thinking their detection roadmaps: https://twitter.com/bigendiansmalls/status/970342360923033601 We adore Tailscale: They have a first-rate team and their product is also widely loved for being startlingly simple to deploy. …
Introduction The AWS API key Canarytoken is a perennial favourite on Canarytokens.org, and we’ve heard requests for a similar token for Azure. In this blog post, we introduce the Azure Login Certificate Token (aka the Azure Token) to Canarytokens.org1. As with all tokens, you can sprinkle Azure tokens throughout your environment and receive high fidelity notifications whenever they’re used. Place one on your CTO’s laptop, or on every server in your fleet. When attackers breach that laptop, or servers, or …
Detect breaches with Canary credit cards! TL;DR; Today we’re releasing a new Canarytoken type: actual credit cards! We recommend placing one anywhere you store payment information. If you ever get an alert on it, you know that that data-store has been compromised. Background Canaries generally aim to look like something an attacker would want to interact with. It’s why our mantra has always been that Canaries should look valuable (instead of just vulnerable). Historically, these have been network services, or …