South African hacker Haroon Meer founded Thinkst Applied Research, which developed and launched a honeypot product that would revolutionise intrusion detection.
South African hacker Haroon Meer founded Thinkst Applied Research, which revolutionised network intrusion detection with its Canary honeypot tools.Thinkst didn’t immediately set out to revolutionise how honeypots are deployed in networks. It began by consulting to other companies and tackling cybersecurity problems Meer described as “difficult and interesting”.
What set Canary apart was that the software was open-sourced, allowing anyone to build their own device if they wanted to. “The field was pretty young and the systems team had a bunch of people leave, so I ended up inheriting all the Unix systems and campus firewall — back when those were Solaris, HP-UX, and SCO boxes.”“We got to chatting about it on IRC, and he invited me to come up to meet the team — who were still working out of his spare bedroom.”
Meer said they realised that well-deployed honeypots could change that. However, they had to be less painful to deploy and maintain.Regarding what he and the company are currently working on, Meer said they are in the middle of a new release, which is keeping much of the company busy. “I have a handful of one-on-ones with team leaders in the company, which I try to group early in the week, and we mainly use this time to make sure stuff is going in the right direction,” he said.“I’m still the official product manager on Canary and CanaryTokens, which means the usual product manager stuff, but it also means I get involved on all customer-impacting user experience changes and flows.
Meer said they try and have as few meetings as possible, with most engineers only having one per week.
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