Thinkst Blog

‪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 ...