Yet another Hacker News

30 points eccgecko 1 hour ago 13 comments

sandeepkd 45 minutes ago | parent

On the funny side, reading the website tagline, apparently they claim to know who is attacking you, they just happen to miss out on who attacked them.

Turns out they are not really a security company, just an aggregator of bad IPs. Ideally this kind of aggregator problem is best suited for a trusted not-for-profit company where providing the data needs some level of credibility and querying the data costs you nominal fee to keep the setup floating.

strictnein 23 minutes ago | parent

What, exactly, is the definition of a "security company" in your mind? Threat Intel companies definitely fall under that normally, so I'm curious what you think it is.

Also, the idea that this type of thing could just be stood up as a "not-for-profit" company and ran for peanuts is kind of silly. How would the nominal fee pay for the engineers and infrastructure? Or would this just be a volunteer effort and you'd like people to do this for free for you?

sandeepkd 12 minutes ago | parent

Any company where understanding of security practices has a direct impact on its revenue from early phases can be considered as a security company in my view.

From what I have seen a large chunk of internet exists and stands on the shoulder of folks who did the volunteer work cause they were passionate about it and enjoyed that part. Once built, the nominal fee for API to check IP address should cover the costs way easily for the servers.

Letsencrypt is a great example, it did took away the big money from all these commercial CA's, who used to issue blue, green and what not kind of checkmarks. Thats one big reason reason why the migration to HTTPS happened faster.

itintheory 7 minutes ago | parent

The basic software is open source, and the list is free if you're running the tool and contributing detections back. They do have some curated lists that you have to pay for.

It's quite a bit less expensive than most other commercial products of this kind that I've looked at.

Meneth 14 minutes ago | parent

I suppose CrowdSec isn't used to analyze GitHub's traffic, so they wouldn't have much info to go on.

If they had self-hosted their own repos, they might have had more luck.

sidcool 27 minutes ago | parent

Security firm hacked.

pixl97 21 minutes ago | parent

A tale as old as time.

itintheory 24 minutes ago | parent

We implemented CrowdSec for bot/scraping mitigation. The architecture is sound, but it ended up having an unacceptable false positive rate for us. This may be an issue with any kind of IP reputation approach. After a couple of months of work getting it ready to go I had to turn it off after a couple of days.

mazzma 3 minutes ago | parent

Interesting, did you implement only IP reputation (via blocklist) or did you deploy the WAF as well? Regarding bot scrapping, you would probably want to try the new bot detection feature recently released

UltraSane 2 minutes ago | parent

I have written my own honeypots to reduce the false positive rate. I simply have things like a VM with RDP and SSH open to the internet and any IP that tries to login gets banned at the firewall for x days. It works really well.