Canary tokens and digital tripwires (Interview)
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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Featuring:
Haroon Meer – Website, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
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!
Risky Business #814 -- It's a bad time to be a scam compound operator
In this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s cybersecurity news, including:
The KK Park scam compound in Myanmar gets blasted with actual dynamite
China sentences more scammers TO DEATH
While Singapore is opting to lash them with the cane
Chinese security firm KnownSec leaks a bunch of documents
Necromancy continues on NSO Group, with a Trump associate in charge
OWASP freshens up the Top 10, you won’t believe what’s number three!
This week’s episode is sponsored by Thinkst Canary. Big bird Haroon Meer joins and, as usual, makes a good point. If you’re going to trust a vendor to do something risky like put a box on your network, they have an obligation to explain how they make that safe. Thinkst has a /security page that does exactly that. So why do we let Palo Alto and Fortinet get away with “trust me, bro”?
This episode is also available on Youtube.
Show notes
Myanmar Junta Dynamites Scam Hub in PR Move as Global Pressure Grows
China sentences 5 Myanmar scam kingpins to death | The Record from Recorded Future News
Law passed for scammers, mules to be caned after victims in Singapore lose almost $4b since 2020 | The Straits Times
KnownSec breach: What we know so far. - NetAskari
Risky Bulletin: Another Chinese security firm has its data leaked
Inside Congress Live
The Government Shutdown Is a Ticking Cybersecurity Time Bomb | WIRED
Former Trump official named NSO Group executive chairman | The Record from Recorded Future News
Short-term renewal of cyber information sharing law appears in bill to end shutdown | The Record from Recorded Future News
Jaguar Land Rover hack hurt the U.K.'s GDP, Bank of England says
Monetary Policy Report - November 2025 | Bank of England
SonicWall says state-linked actor behind attacks against cloud backup service | Cybersecurity Dive
Japanese media giant Nikkei reports Slack breach exposing employee and partner records | The Record from Recorded Future News
"Intel sues former employee for allegedly stealing confidential data" Post by @campuscodi.risky.biz — Bluesky
Introduction - OWASP Top 10:2025 RC1
Attack of the Canaries! (Interview)
This week we’re joined by Haroon Meer from Thinkst — the makers of Canary and Canary Tokens. Haroon walks us through a network getting compromised, what it takes to deploy a Canary on your network, how they maintain low false-positive numbers, their thoughts and principles on building their business (major wisdom shared!), and how a Canary helps surface network attacks in real time.
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Featuring:
Haroon Meer – Website, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Thinkst Applied Research
Thinkst Canary
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!