Thinkst Blog

Last week team Thinkst downed tools again for our bi-annual HackWeek. The rules of HackWeek are straightforward: Make Stuff; Learn; Have fun. We discussed HackWeek briefly last year : Our HackWeek parameters are simple: We down tools on all but the most essential work (primarily anything customer-facing) and instead scope and build something. The project absolutely does not have to be work-related, and people can work individually or in teams. The key deadline is a 10-minute demo on the Friday afternoon. The demos are in front of the rest of the team, and results count more than intentions. We pride ourselves on being a "learning organization" and HackWeek is one of the things that help make that happen. It's always awesome seeing a software-developer solder their first board or seeing someone non-technical write their first lines of python. Project highlights this year:  Az used the SimH simulator  to run an obscure Soviet Mainframe (the BESM-6 ): Eventually, he had the ...

Canaries and Canarytokens are tripwires that can alert you to intrusions. When alerts trigger, we want to make sure you get them where you need them. While our Slack integration is cool , you might prefer to send alerts through your SIEM. Or to a security automation tool. Maybe you want to leverage our API to integrate Canary alerts into a custom SOC tool. Want to turn a smart light bulb red and play the Imperial March ? You could do that too. Your way or the highway We often puzzle at products that require customers to totally revamp how they do things. We never presume to be the most important tool in your toolbox, which is why our product is designed to be installed, configured, and (somewhat) forgotten, in minutes. We’d rather disappear into your existing workflow, only becoming visible again when you need us most. Our customers dictate where and how they see our alerts. To enable this, we provide a wide variety of flexible options for sending and consuming alerts. By default, you’...

‪If you force people to jump through hoops to handle alerts, they’ll soon stop doing it 🤯‬ ‪Canary optimizes for fewer alerts but we also ensure that you can handle alerts easily without us.‬ ‪So it takes just 4 minutes to setup a Canary but far less to pull our alerts into Slack‬. By default, your console will send you alerts via email or SMS, but there are a few other tricks up its sleeve. It is trivial to also get alerts via webhooks, syslog or our API. This post will show you how to get alerts into your Slack. The process is similar for Microsoft Teams and other messaging apps that use webhooks for integration. It’s quick, painless and super useful. ( This post is unfortunately now also bound to be anti-climactic - it’s going to take you longer to read this than to do the integration ). Did you know how easy this can be? The Canary Console can integrate with Microsoft Teams and Slack in seconds and with a few more steps, can integrate with any other webhook-friendly platform. The ...

...what if someone finds out? Do attackers care if there are canaries in my network? People wonder if they need to hide the defensive tech used on their networks. Like all interesting dilemmas, the answer is nuanced. In defense of obscurity In any discussion about obscurity you will almost certainly have someone shout about “security through obscurity” being bad. As a security strategy, obscurity is a terrible plan. As an opportunity to slow down or confuse attackers, it’s an easy win. Every bit of information an attacker has to gather during a campaign gains the defender time. This is very much a race against time. No breach happens the moment a shell is popped or SQL injection is discovered. Attackers are flying blind and must explore the environments they’ve broken into to find their target. Defenders can seize the opportunity to stop an incident before it becomes a breach. It is often true that attackers typically operate with a fuller view of the chessboard than defenders. However...

We've got hundreds of servers and thousands of Canaries deployed in the world. Keeping them healthy is a large part of what we do, and why customers sign up for Canary. Monitoring plays a big role in supporting our flocks and keeping the infrastructure humming along. A pretty common sight in operations are dashboards covered with graphs, charts, widgets, and gizmos, all designed to give you insight into the status of your systems. We are generally against doing things “just because everyone does it” and have avoided plastering the office with “pew-pew maps” or vanity graphs. (although the odd bird-migration graph does slip through) As with most ops related checks, many of ours are rooted in previous issues we've encountered. We rely heavily on DNS for comms between our bird and consoles, and interruptions in DNS are something we want to know about early. Likewise, we want to ensure each customer console (plus other web properties) are accessible. There are tools available for ...

Shared passwords, sensitive documents: mailboxes are great targets for attackers. Would you know they were targeted? We’ve got your back! Our Office 365 token deploys to thousands of mailboxes in minutes and alerts you when someone is snooping around. Why an Office 365 Mail token? Enterprises have been flocking (ha) to Office 365 for years now and a large number of Thinkst customers are using it. The Canaries will detect attackers on their networks, but nothing lets them know if an attacker has compromised a single mailbox and is snooping around. Canarytokens are great at becoming high fidelity tripwires in places that other tools can’t easily go. You can quickly head over to https://canarytokens.org to create a token, and then place it in Bob’s mailbox, but how does this work for an entire office? Will it work for an entire org? Easy! The Office 365 Mail token can drop a pre-written, tokened email into multiple mailboxes at once. We insert the emails into mailboxes automatically, so i...