Category: Uncategorized

Earlier this year we released our WireGuard Canarytoken. This allows you to add a “fake” wireguard VPN endpoint on your device in seconds. The idea is that if your device is compromised, a knowledgeable attacker is likely to enumerate VPN configurations and try connect to them. Our Canarytoken means that if this happens, you receive an alert. This can be useful at moments like national border crossings when devices can be seized and inspected out of sight. Using the WireGuard …

(The making of a MySQL Canarytoken) tl;dr Consider this scenario: An industrious attacker lands on one of your servers and finds a 5MB MySQL dump file (say, called prod_primary.dump). What do they do next? Typically, they would load this dump-file into a temporary database to rummage through the data. As soon as they do, you get an email/SMS/alert letting you know: Eds note: You can create and deploy these by visiting canarytokens.org (completely free; no registration needed) There are obvious benefits …

Last month Florian Roth (cyb3rops) reacted to the news of Mimikatz dumping RDP credentials by asking how we could easily inject fake credentials into machines. https://twitter.com/cyb3rops/status/1397440903476883458 Markus Neis pointed out that on Windows, cmdkey allows you to do this:  https://twitter.com/markus_neis/status/1397472760859856897 This is pretty awesome. Mimikatz is used by attackers the world over and having control of the data a Mimikatzer will see is a powerful tool to have. One route to looking for Mimikatz usage is injecting false credentials into …

Would you know if your phone was hacked? Even the most powerful people in the world (if you use wealth as a proxy for power) don’t. The problem is that much like your networks there are an almost unlimited number of ways for attackers to break into them, so this problem seems intractable at first blush. But (just like when they break into your networks) attackers who break into your phones are looking to achieve certain objectives, and you can use …

This year Thinkst Canary crossed the line to $11M in ARR. That number is reasonably significant in the startup world, where Lemkin refers to it as “initial scale”. For us; it’s a happy reminder of Canary’s spread into the market. $11M ARR certainly isn’t our end goal, but it provides the fuel for us to keep building the company we want to work at. We got here without raising a dime in capital, shipping a hardware/SaaS hybrid, sitting way outside …

The recent SolarWinds incident has managed to grab headlines outside of our security ecosystem. The many (many) headlines and columns inches dedicated to the event are testament to the security worries that continue to reverberate around the globe.  But we think that most of these articles have buried the lede.  Most discussions take the position that our enterprises are horribly exposed because of supply chain issues and that any network running SolarWinds should consider themselves compromised.  We think it’s actually …

Because we can One of our great pleasures and privileges at Thinkst is that every year we set aside a full week for pure hacking/building. The goals for our “Hackweek” are straightforward: build stuff while learning new things. Last week was the 2020 Hackweek work-from-home edition, and this post is a report on how it went. Now in its the fourth year, our Hackweek has come to serve as a kind of a capstone to our year, and folks start thinking …

One of the big disconnects in infosec lies between people who build infosec products and people who end up using them on the ground. On the one hand, this manifests as misplaced effort: features that are used once in a product-lifetime get tons of developer-effort, while tiny pieces of friction that will chaff the user daily are ignored as insignificant. On the other, this leaves a swath of problems that are considered “solved” that really aren’t. The first problem is …