Haroon Meer is back! Haroon is the Founder of Thinkst, the ~50-person bootstrapped company behind Canary and Canarytokens — honeypots and tripwires you sprinkle inside your network and forget about until an attacker touches one. We talk about the AWS API key token attackers just can’t resist trying, the real credit card token backed by an actual bank partnership, Breadcrumbs (their brand-new feature that leads intruders straight to your canaries), a live demo where a hardware Canary becomes a Synology NAS in one click, and how a company with zero outbound sales and no price increase in ten years quietly passed $22.5 million in ARR.

Featuring

Sponsors

Buildkite – You deserve better CI. Buildkite is engineered for frontier scale and trusted by the teams setting the pace.

WorkOS – Auth for CLI with AuthKit from WorkOS — Bring secure browser-based login to your terminal apps using the OAuth Device Flow, with the same polished AuthKit experience plus SSO, MFA, and passkeys. Learn more at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com

Notes & Links

📝 Edit Notes

Chapters

1 00:00 Welcome back Haroon! 02:10
2 02:10 Fifty people, zero outbound sales, 22.5M ARR 01:57
3 04:07 Honeypots inside the network, not research toys 03:00
4 07:07 The AWS API key attackers can't resist 02:13
5 09:20 Hosting Canarytokens free for the world 02:14
6 11:33 Ten years without a price increase 04:39
7 16:12 A Python shop and a self-hosted token server 04:24
8 20:37 Real credit card as a tripwire 02:16
9 22:53 Dragging attacks into molasses 04:02
10 26:55 Demo: Synology NAS in one click (watch on YouTube) 09:41
11 36:36 WireGuard tokens, QR codes, and dumpster divers 04:11
12 40:47 Sponsor: Buildkite 02:49
13 43:35 Securing the canaries themselves 02:11
14 45:46 $7.5K to start, million-dollar customers 03:14
15 49:00 Airport ads, padel, and quality swag 05:50
16 54:50 Open Canary, the free little brother 01:38
17 56:28 Self-hosting and sovereignty in the agent era 05:39
18 1:02:07 Divergent codebases and DNS-tunneled updates 06:16
19 1:08:23 A first acquisition and open source PRs 05:00
20 1:13:22 Breadcrumbs lead attackers to canaries 05:52
21 1:19:14 Tokens in binaries, catching reverse engineers!! 03:08
22 1:22:22 Sponsor: WorkOS 02:16
23 1:24:38 Why Python still pays the bills 09:01
24 1:33:39 Don't overthink it. Just deploy. 07:54
25 1:41:33 GPL, clean rooms, and playing with other vendors 03:02
26 1:44:35 Growth without jet fuel 06:30
27 1:51:05 canary.love, law enforcement, NVIDIA, and Grafana 11:41
28 2:02:46 Wrapping up...canary.tools and canarytokens.org 04:00

Transcript

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