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•18m ago
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•7m ago
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•2m ago
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•8m ago
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•22m ago
Security firm hacked.
pixl97•16m ago
A tale as old as time.
itintheory•19m ago
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.
sandeepkd•39m ago
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•18m ago
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•7m ago
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•2m ago
It's quite a bit less expensive than most other commercial products of this kind that I've looked at.
Meneth•8m ago
If they had self-hosted their own repos, they might have had more luck.