Hacking as a pathway to building better Products

Most security products are terrible. For years our industry has managed to get by because our products were mandated by someone or some regulation, and users were trained to accept that security and usability were necessary trade-offs. This was just the prevailing truth. One of the reasons we always promote hacker-led companies is because hackers delight in challenging accepted truths. We think this applies as much to product design as it does to smashing the stack. In a few months,

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Unfashionably secure: why we use isolated VMs

Would your rather observe an eclipse through a pair of new Ray-Bans, or a used Shade 12 welding helmet? Undoubtably the Aviators are more fashionable, but the permanent retinal damage sucks. Fetch the trusty welding helmet. We’ve made a number of security choices when building Canary that have held us in pretty good stead. These choices are interesting in that they don’t involve the purchase of security products, they don’t get lots of discussion in security engineering threads, and they

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Refreshing Canarytokens.org: a new interface, new functionality, and our security assessment results

Screenshot of the new https://canarytokens.org site, showing all the available Canarytokens panels.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the revamped Canarytokens.org, our free Canarytokens service. When you visit the updated site, you’ll notice several key enhancements. First, the user interface has undergone a significant refresh. At Thinkst, we view code as a craft, and this philosophy guided us as we meticulously rebuilt the interface piece by piece. The result is an experience that is not only more intuitive but also more enjoyable to use. Second, we’ve expanded the management functionality

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Unobtrusively Upgrading Ubuntu Underfoot

At Thinkst Canary, we make the world’s easiest to deploy and manage honeypots. The high-level architecture for each customer is a web-based management dashboard (called the Console), plus the honeypots that the customer has deployed into their networks. We run the dashboard, customers run the honeypots. Our Console fleet is thousands of machines at this time, and this blogpost describes how we recently upgraded our fleet without any customer-noticeable downtime. Background: Canary Consoles Customers manage their honeypots, configure alerting, and

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