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46% Positive
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#company#security#free#crowdsec#blocklist#kind#github#bot#nominal#fee
Discussion (25 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I can understand the myriad reasons for why a company would be inconvenienced by that.
But on the other hand, it seems like a reason for me to never use the vendor
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.
If they had self-hosted their own repos, they might have had more luck.
Even regarding the blast radius, I do not really believe any company is honest about it. They do not have tools to verify it, if the user information was accessed with leaked token or real token. The thing that works in their favor is that no one else can verify it either which absolves them from any responsibility. Any platform engineer knows that your CICD system has the keys to the kingdom.
> The thing that works in their favor is that no one else can verify it either which absolves them from any responsibility
That's not how this works, at all. You need to have enough evidence that you can confidently demonstrate that there is no sign of a broader breach. If you get sued and can't do that, you're in trouble, because being unable to do that shows that you were acting negligently.
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?
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.
It's quite a bit less expensive than most other commercial products of this kind that I've looked at.
> 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.
This could, quite literally, be any company on earth then? But not CrowdSec, because they had a single security issue? Every company on earth has had those, including every security company.
They provide several IP blacklists. None of those seem to be false positives. You can also add custom 3rd party blocklists.
They also provide several different rulesets. It is up to you to choose which ones to use and fine tune. LLMs can be very helpful with that.
And there are 3rd party dashboards and tools that help you manage it more easily.
I use the free version as a simple WAF on multiple servers and it blocks a lot of bots. It did require some initial finetuning though.
Are there any better open source solutions?
Behavioral and client fingerprint analysis (ugh-- having to run Javascript just to view a static site) is the only way (at least until we get user "age" and identity attestation rammed down our throats).
wrt bot detection - this sounds very much like Anubis which we're also using with some success.
On the flip side, there was allegedly no PII leaked. But this event is still a red flag as it means their internal ops are absolutely shit. So it’s another vendor receiving a PNG flag.
CrowdSec. CrowdStrike.