We got workflows, tables and case management. Focused on SecOps, ITOps, and prod eng / infra use cases.
Even if you’re on Jira or SNOW, having even a basic ticketing system built in turned out to be a very productive persistence layer for our users to prototype with.
Yes can run the whole thing through a set of AWS lambdas, pull basic sec platform alerts from your GSuite and so on, dump all them into slack webhooks, dump into slack sec channels, align any sec IR processes to you Ops IR processes which you’ll need anyway.
From there, be disciplined about password managers early, get on at least separate OS logins if still doing BYOD, link up 2FA via Google auth, and figure out your email infra and where the root email that matters for infra is. Enterprise sec up and running.
Dude. I do not trust Lambdas. I've seen way too many CTFs and Cloud privesc paths to know how one even slightly misconfigured Lambda can led to full admin access.
We have a more local solution to query our security logs.
Thanks for the comment Ross. Folks seem to have strong opinions about integrating or separating workflows and ticketing ala alert inbox. We like integrations a lot, but of course there needs to be security specific innovations on top of "just" an inbox that will make us the no-brainer choice.
I see that and I see a bad security posture, and the responsibility passed up chain and even harder to answer the same questions about oneleet. Will they secure your gsuite email I assume you’re using? Will they respond to phishing attacks at you? Will they prevent SMS 2FA? Will they get you into SSO? Is a password manager in place? Are y’all using personal laptops still? Segregated logins? Will they tell you not to share publicly as a VC-backed startup about who is doing your infrasec and by a pretty clear implication what your infra likely looks like?
How to not turn you into me hacked is a balance of the prod/infrasec (like the company you linked), and bread and butter enterprise sec, which only comes from in house. So, in house team, or at least a 1x hire, such that there is at least a more than vague indicator that someone in house there day to day knows how to do security, or it doesn’t matter from a vendor risk point of views.
The list of vendors that have passed audits with complaint environments and gotten hacked is very long.
A way to handle this pragmatically is give board advisory shares to a person who straddles the following abilities (and listen to them), until you have enough funds to hire a sec eng:
- is technical enough to know what needs to get done and why
- has enough startup sec experience to know what pragmatic advice is in light of tight funding for startups
If you’re YC-backed this should be easy to source.
Why this thread matters and I’ll close it is dev-speak (“awesome, delightful, obsessed”) doesn’t matter at all for selling to a sec team, which is who is going to pay and vet this. That language just tells me it’s going to be a slog through VC sales-speak to answer the concerns I listed. It’s all about the above I mentioned, plus the tech setup which I think you have done with the right mindset (just plug into everything, parse it, ship it to the usual sources. Don’t try to reinvent Jira or Slack please).
The other reason you have to think about this is what market SOARs sell into. They aren’t needed until a lot of other due diligence is done - EDR deployments, enterprise sec, email sec, etc etc. So, that’s a decently established company, and if they’re paying for SOAR, it means they are either the lucky program with healthy budget support, or have a threat environment just justifying it all. A lot of places just get a bad MSSP and call it a day. So, if you are a company justifying SOAR (bc of implied budget and program maturity), you deal with threat actors who know their stuff well enough. And, as a fair number of exploits indicate this part 2-3 years, they know to evaluate SaaS vendors as the way in. Looking at the stack, they could try Okta, CrowdStike, MSFT, GSuite and all the difficulty there… or the two data engineers and their startup. Gotta take it seriously, a lot of sec is abstract risk but this is happening in the wild now.
Really appreciate the advice here. I also hate security theatre. We will make it triple clear that our Cloud version is JUST for preview, not production.
Repeat (as we mentioned in our README) for anybody reading this thread: Cloud is just for preview! Upload a known malware SHA-256 sample, send it off to VirusTotal, then pass the JSON response into a LLM action to summarize. There are plenty of workflows you can run to test our platform without exposing sensitive data.
Excited to work on securing our platform though. Thanks for the basic checklist. We have a lot more work to do and will find the best security professionals to work with. There are plenty of scary good practitioners, folks who have seen and responded to APTs in their previous work, within the YC network. The first thing we did when we got into YC was network with the YC security community.
Here are some shout outs who are helping YC companies and beyond truly improve their security posture:
- Oneleet: 10 year+ experienced red teamers, now building an all-in-one pentest, vCISO, vSOC, and compliance platform and service
- 0Pass: FIDO2 keys as service (ex-SpaceX, Amazon Cognito security engineers)
- Infisical: open source secrets management
Same sort of questions - if the whole YC suite is secured by other YC security startups, that’s raises the same questions about where does the risk recursion stop - is anyone using yubikeys, vetted secrets management platforms, plainjane google auth, is there an internal SOC + SSO anywhere, and done by hires with actual blue team experience?
Sec teams don’t want to sign vendors to support innovation. We sign them to not get hacked, increase the odds that we’re not, and save money after. The less bread and butter deployments seen, the more skepticism is needed. Again, this model is actively exploited currently bc threat actors do this same logic.
Cloud version. No SSO tax. We're doing a Show HN as we had strong conviction our message would resonate without the "sticky" Launch HN board. Looks like we were right!
We are building out an OSS startup security program: Prowler as the CPSM, Trufflehog for secrets scanning, for code scanning...I personally think GitHub CodeQL is good enough, but please tell me otherwise. Our security model for our AWS infra definitely relies a lot on having fine-grained ACLs and security groups. The stack is all in AWS CDK and open source (of course, I'm not a fan when OSS security platforms claim to support self-hosted but it's only a docker-compose file). Supply chain attacks. We keep dependencies light and also rely on GitHub's dependency scanner.
I believe you're a fan of Panther? I find that funny because their out-of-the-box detection rules are limited. Once again, a good CSPM and SSO will do a lot more than a SIEM for startup security. Unless you are really telling me we need a 24/7 blue team monitoring our 10-15ish alerts. Oh by the way, we use AWS SSO and org, only role based permissions for everything, fine-grained GitHub SSO for CICD (down to the repo level because we know about that sneaky privesc path when you use *), and isolated SCPs for prod and staging (of course).
You mentioned phishing two technical founders as some real security threat. That might FUD someone with no security experience and don't have FIDO2 or device MFA set up. But turns out, my cofounder and I have both those things!
And because we know what are doing, CloudTrail is set up in a separate OU to avoid log tampering in case of a breach.
I wouldn’t recommend panther or a SIEM for small startups.
D&R is a bit less important for startups beyond some python scripts piping in the boilerplate alerts via API that gsuite, SSO and cloudtrail generate for you. Prowler is going to buy you a lot of overhead that just enabling GuardDuty and SecHub would do for you quickly and pivot back to revenue ops.
What will get you, and secure infra providers wont do for you, and is a blind spot often with startups who focus all on infrasec (like you mapped out), is enterprise sec, which goes beyond phishing.
- are y’all all still on personal laptops? Personal emails anywhere, those laptops have any sort of EDR on them? Personal phones? What’s your SIM swap plan and setup?
- is a pw manager in place? A corporate account vs individual accs? Are you storing secrets on BYOD, any hanging out in envvars or apple notes?
- phishing: I here you, but devs are often the biggest phishing failure stats. And MFA measures in half of it. The other half is you click, doesn’t push you to a login page, just drops something on your endpoint, and no EDR there to tell you it happened.
- is there someone there telling you not to get social engineered by an annoying hackernews account into listing out large chunks in detail of your security stack, which is very closehold data?
Also - going back through six months of comments to find something about Panther is odd
This all makes a lot of sense. I agree that SOC2 can be security theatre (I mean a lot of the language of the standard is suggestive, not a requirement). But a lot of your points about having MDM and EDR set up is covered by that cert. It's just how you implement it. And we intend to do it well. The cert and the "trust page" is a signal of our security practices, but at least we wouldn't have to go through it over at HN...
Maybe because I did cryptography at a mathematical level in college, I never really bought into the idea of security through obfuscation. Also the empirical evidence behind whether hiding your tech stack makes you more secure as a non-state level actor / software company actually leans towards the side of "it doesn't really matter".
We obviously do a lot more in our infra/corp sec side that I'm not sharing. But really everything I listed are well known best practices that any attacker should assume a relatively non-stupid security-aware startup should have.
I mean I guess I do believe a bit in security through obfuscation. Not sharing our password manager and IdP as many providers haven't had (as you mentioned) great track record in this space.
I do think it might be a difference of where we learned security. I found folks like yourself from your certain gov/military background to buy into security via obfuscation a lot more. I guess we can agree to disagree.
I don’t buy into security via obfuscation at all, but that meme comes from the context of hoping your infra is too confusing for an attacker to figure out once they find it.
For the context of digging into your sec stack on open-access platforms, ya def obfuscate haha, public review is step 0 in pentests for a reason.
Help us out? I really would like to hear your advice / thoughts / experience in private. Please find me via email (no getting making this public unfortunately)!
I am curious though. Have you ever seen an attack path from a personal device compromise to full Cloud account takeover (or something along those lines like an exfil job or cryptojacking).
I haven't?
Usually compromised personal devices at the startup level comes from a spray-and-pray watering hole campaign. Likely to be used as part of a botnet, where your device is 1 in a million. Nothing really targeted where the end goal is to compromise a seed / series A's crown jewels.
Once again, please share stories if I should be more worried.
This was how Lastpass was exploited +/- details, lot of write-ups on this.
Devops eng ran a personal unpatched Plex server, threat actor came in via home network/plex, pivoted to personal, devops eng accessed production via the personal.
To your point, this is fairly targeted.
But to your other point, you miss what I’m hammering above - Series A’s Crown Jewels, if it is selling SOAR (or any other sec tool in this direction) are its clients and their sec infra. 90% of the time, Series A can get hacked and who cares really. If you’re selling SOAR, you’re hacked to hack clients. JumpCloud, selling identity, was hacked this way last yr.
Threat actors know about the angle I am describing in this thread wrt to this. Sec and identity infra has been targeted heavily for the last 24 months, specially to pivot into client companies. If you’re selling SOAR, this is what to plan for.
This is also pretty common across crypto.
All in all, depends on your threat model, and if you’re selling security tools, your clients’ threat model becomes your own, bc threat actors know and exploit this now.
Any thoughts on our analysis regarding case management and log storage? These are two technical decisions we made before writing a single line of code to bring down cost and increase value-for-money.
Staying within the tool to manage cases is good vs shelling out to Jira or another ticketing tool. Folks with purchasing authority typically want their analysts in the tool as much as possible (in my experience; you may find customers who want to open incidents elsewhere so keep that interface in mind).
Also a good choice in storing logs. Make a margin but don't be greedy, otherwise you turn into Splunk, where folks don't want to use the product effectively because they can't afford to. Make it easy to route logs to S3 cold storage or other "reliable enough" object storage systems based on criteria, but retaining the capability to retrieve them if needed for forensics or compliance/audit sampling. Log storage intervals are traditionally some variation of 30, 60, 90 days, a year, seven years, etc. Architect accordingly based on your customers' record retention schedule(s), control/compliance requirements, etc.
you may find customers who want to open incidents elsewhere so keep that interface in mind
My large financial (and many in our peer group that I've talked to) see "open incidents elsewhere" (WorkDay in our case) as minimum table stakes. YMMV.
Well...that's a problem you need to think about. If all you see is how startups or SMB do this (or what people tell you on HN), you're going to be massively missing the mark when you talk to more large/enterprise customers. Things like "well of course Discord" will be met with "we use Teams", or even worse "yeah...we're still on Notes". I had one vendor recently who said "why would we ever need to integrate with Archer?"...well, we have a GRC requirement to attest to certain actions your tool is supporting, and our auditors look at Archer as a source-of-truth, and noone wants to manually update Archer with the output of your tool. Lightbulb moment.
Tl;dr - make integrations drop dead easy, because you never know what baroque workflow you're going to need to dovetail with the make the sale.
Tracecat is still in alpha, but would be great to have your thoughts / opinions / feedback in our Discord community. We are anon-friendly. There's still a lot more we can innovation on.
Will post an updated demo with the output and share it here later today! But here is what one response looks like:
"Thank you for your report. the AI labelled this email as malicious. It contained the url https://to58gnrroh2pot.pages.dev/smart89/. The summary: The URLScan report indicates a high likelihood of phishing activity associated with the analyzed URL. The overall score is 100, with identified categories including "phishing" and specific branding as a "tech support scam." The report highlights the presence of malicious intent, with tags such as "phishing" further supporting this classification. The analysis involved IPs from Germany and the Netherlands, associated with the domains "to58gnrroh2pot.pages.dev" and "ipwho.is," and servers named "cloudflare" and "ipwhois." Various URLs, domains, certificates, and hashes were examined during the scan, pointing towards a comprehensive evaluation of the webpage's content and its potential threat level. The verdicts from URLScan and the community reinforce the malicious nature of the webpage, emphasizing the need for caution."
Great question! Unlike a pure infrastructure tool (MongoDB, Elastic, Terraform), UI/UX is a critical factor for adopting a SOAR.
Even if other companies fork / host Tracecat, we believe we can out iterate the incumbents in building the best SOAR experience. And I think we are just getting started with UI/UX for AI features in security products. It's definitely not a clippy chatbot...
My cofounder and I wrote every line of code for the frontend, design, data pipeline, docs. I don't think the incumbents can build as quickly and accurately (from customer feedback to implementation) as we can.
I wish you all the best but unfortunately I think you will find out that this business model doesn't work and if you give something for free most companies won't pay for it even if they have the money as it doesn't even worth to go through procurement if it is free. You will have to lock some features in an open core way or other way to paywall companies to pay-up.
Hope Im wrong but I think in the last few years all companies realised that FOSS is not a business model.
We got workflows, tables and case management. Focused on SecOps, ITOps, and prod eng / infra use cases.
Even if you’re on Jira or SNOW, having even a basic ticketing system built in turned out to be a very productive persistence layer for our users to prototype with.
Copy left AGPL 3.0 license.