
Canary tokens and digital tripwires (Interview)
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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.
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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
Featuring:
Show Notes:
- Thinkst
- Thinkst Canary
- Thinkst Canary Security
- Canary Tokens
- Canary Tokens Docs
- Canary Tokens on GitHub
- OpenCanary on GitHub
- OpenCanary Docs
- TechCrunch: A decade in, bootstrapped Thinkst Canary reaches $20M in ARR without VC funding
- Grafana Labs: Canary Tokens, the unsung heroes of security
- Canary Love
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
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workos.comAuthKit.com
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thinkst.comLinkedIn
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x.comThinkst Canary
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canary.toolsCanary Tokens
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github.comOpenCanary on GitHub
github.comOpenCanary Docs
opencanary.readthedocs.ioCanary Love
canary.toolsPRs welcome!
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- 0:00Welcome back Haroon!
- 2:10Fifty people, zero outbound sales, 22.5M ARR
- 4:07Honeypots inside the network, not research toys
- 7:07The AWS API key attackers can't resist
- 9:20Hosting Canarytokens free for the world
- 11:33Ten years without a price increase
- 16:12A Python shop and a self-hosted token server
- 20:37Real credit card as a tripwire
- 22:53Dragging attacks into molasses
- 26:55Demo: Synology NAS in one click (watch on YouTube)
- 36:36WireGuard tokens, QR codes, and dumpster divers
- 40:47Sponsor: Buildkite
- 43:35Securing the canaries themselves
- 45:46$7.5K to start, million-dollar customers
- 49:00Airport ads, padel, and quality swag
- 54:50Open Canary, the free little brother
- 56:28Self-hosting and sovereignty in the agent era
- 1:02:07Divergent codebases and DNS-tunneled updates
- 1:08:23A first acquisition and open source PRs
- 1:13:22Breadcrumbs lead attackers to canaries
- 1:19:14Tokens in binaries, catching reverse engineers!!
- 1:22:22Sponsor: WorkOS
- 1:24:38Why Python still pays the bills
- 1:33:39Don't overthink it. Just deploy.
- 1:41:33GPL, clean rooms, and playing with other vendors
- 1:44:35Growth without jet fuel
- 1:51:05canary.love, law enforcement, NVIDIA, and Grafana
- 2:02:46Wrapping up...canary.tools and canarytokens.org