AppCanary (YC S15) Helps Your Company Stay Safe from Security Vulnerabilities

http://blog.ycombinator.com/every-day-theres-a-new-zero-day-appcanary-yc-s15-makes-sure-your-company-is-safe

by loyalelectron • 11 years ago

14 4 11 years ago

blog.ycombinator.com

phillmv• 11 years ago

Hello friends,

I'm one of the founders. Zero-days are exciting but we're especially good about the things that don't stay on the top of HN all day. Silent killers as it were.

Today we support Ruby and Ubuntu but we're expanding quickly! And if you're interested but don't have the time to try us out today, we also made http://isitvulnerable.com/ to demo what we can do.

Cheers,

iheartmemcache• 11 years ago

Can you talk about the internals of your system without giving away your secret sauce? I.e., are you doing anything more than pulling CVE notifications, comparing the vuln against what the server is running, and if there's an intersection, inform the end user?

(Not to belittle your product -- patio11 made a living, and more importantly a brand, off of a Bingo Card app. Your product certainly offers value, and its particularly underpriced if you ask me. Still, I'm genuinely curious if you're doing any heuristic analyses, fuzzing, or other server-specific things to determine whether or not you're vulnerable to said exploit.)

dang• 11 years ago

We like launches and we like AppCanary, but after https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935458 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10022717 I think this has to count as a dupe.

stephendicato• 11 years ago

Knowing if your application's dependencies have released security patches isn't just valuable, it's necessary. It's very painful and time consuming to monitor email lists, websites, RSS feeds, and GitHub issues for relevant information.

In my opinion, providing that information in a timely and actionable way, such as telling me when and how to update, is a useful service. When looking for a solution for Python applications I found https://requires.io/. It's a clever implementation since it reads a requirements file and is therefore easy to "deploy" and get immediately value from.

Your marketing leans towards 0-day protection. The challenge is doing anything actionable with knowledge of a new 0-day. Unless there is a patch available, which implies the discloser worked with the project/vendor, or a known workaround in lieu of official patch, how is your service doing to help?

What's your plan for supporting more operating systems, languages, and ecosystems? Are you curating information about security disclosures and software releases, or simply checking if newer versions of packages are available?

AppCanary (YC S15) Helps Your Company Stay Safe from Security Vulnerabilities

Related Stories