We are looking for two engineers that are interested in helping design and develop new products to help extend WatchGuard's enterprise-grade security to every endpoint. Our customers routinely ask for improved ways to protect employees who work off the corporate network – you’ll be a big part of delivering that solution.
As part of this role, you will work on both the endpoint application and the backing cloud services. You will be part of a small engineering team located in Wakefield, MA (~15 minutes North of Boston) that truly values building high quality solutions to customer's daily security challenges.
Percipient Networks | https://strongarm.io | ONSITE | Wakefield, MA | Full-time | Engineering, Marketing, and Technical Sales positions
We are building Strongarm, a cloud-based anti-malware solution that is designed specifically for small and medium businesses. Protecting your business doesn't need to be complicated or expensive!
Please see our hiring page for more information (https://strongarm.io/careers/) or email us directly at jobs@strongarm.io
We're building strongarm.io - the best way to stop malware from damaging your business - and are seeking software and operations engineers to help us build and scale our services.
Last summer, we had four successful hires from Hacker News. Now we are looking for a couple more. You'd be joining a small team of passionate engineers and security experts dedicated to helping secure businesses of all sizes. We love Python, Django, and Twisted and run on AWS.
Please email jobs@strongarm.io for more information and to apply.
> Although, Linode's email isn't what notified is, it was our intrusion detection system.
Are you able to elaborate on this? I understand you may not want to name specific vendors/products in the name of operational security but it sounds like in this scenario whatever is in place actually did its job.
Most of this is still valid. There may be some differences as we've improved our configuration over time.
We use OSSEC for host-level intrusion detection. This fired off quite a few alerts as the malicious party began to log in as root on the serial console, amongst other things.
We also have supplemented it with other tools, such as an in-house wrapper around nmap, to alert us to hosts that don't match their expected network configuration. So when ports get opened incorrectly, someone is alerted usually within a minute.
To add to that, bcrypt is not the best recommendation if choosing a password hash today. In theory they should be adopting Argon2 (or maybe scrypt).
In practice, I suspect that either the bindings for Argon2/scrypt don't exist or aren't easily adoptable given their use of ColdFusion. They do exist in Python.
I'm saying this as a proponent of Argon2, who has invested a lot of time trying to improve the codebase[0].
It currently isn't ready in large production. Efforts to stabilise the API are being spearheaded by someone apparently outside the project[1]. If you're reading this @lucab, thank you.
In the meantime, my Ruby bindings have been broken on three separate occasions due to API changes. You could easily say "Don't track master", but the one release has a tag of 20151206, and it's just an arbitrary a tag as any particular commit id. There is no branch from which you could apply "bugfix only" updates.
Two separate commits broke compilation. This commit[2] was a shambles.
Most importantly, they have commits going in two days ago that change the test vectors[3]. That means if you update your library, verifying existing passwords breaks. The hash identifier doesn't change ( in the way that bcrypt had $2, then changed it to $2a then $2y when they changed the algorithm) which means you can't just write an "upgrade hash" function. I can't find any documentation relating to this change.
It's important to note that none of this means your passwords are easily broken, or that it's insecure, which is the implication I often see thrown around when discussing Argon2 being "new".
All three are good choices, with their own advantages and disadvantages. Argon2 may be clearly the best choice a few years from now, but both the algorithm and software implementations are immature. It's makes sense to be conservative and go with the more battle-tested options.
(Also last I looked Python has no good scrypt bindings.)
Just an FYI, NIST still recommends SHA-2 for password hashing, they still don't see enough benefit from Bcrypt with the advent of super fast ASIC and FPGAs. Scrypt and Argon2 are too immature. Coldfusion isn't a reason for not using either as cold fusion can run any Java code very easily. Python can run C code easily. So bindings for any language is never a reason as long as you know how to use your tools.
Bcrypt does add some extra benefits over SHA-2 for typical offline password hacking. So it's still a good step.
It would be foolish to go with Agon2 as it only won the Password Hashing contest a little over 6 months ago. Bcrypt has been found to be solid for other 15 years now and has had tons of eye balls on it.
Scrypt has had issue in the past and hasn't been nearly as scrutinized as Bcrypt.
The fact of the matter is, the good guys aren't working as hard as the bad guys when it comes to good security.
Does Clubhouse have any features to help show a product roadmap to other teams? For example, something that shows the priorities and queued work for the next six months that can be referenced by an inside sales team.
We have a dedicated page for Epics which lets you prioritize epics against each other, which basically provides a high-level priority that anyone in the company can look at to get an idea of what the next few months look like. We're also working on building roadmap support to make epic dependencies/order more explicit.
We currently use Trello for project management but find that the duplication of data between Trello and GitHub and the lack of "higher order" views (epics, roadmap, etc) make us want to move to a more purpose built service.
(Full disclosure: I run a service that blocks and intercepts malware communication using DNS! https://strongarm.io)
Blocking via your hosts file has some great benefits; it works regardless of network and is relatively easy to update. Unfortunately, it doesn't scale easily to many systems or give you any insight into whether or not you are trying to connect to blocked domains.
Blocking via DNS is a good alternative and is suggested multiple times in this thread. You can easily protect a whole network by setting your recursive resolvers and it works across any system.
If you are interested in this and don't want to operate and maintain your own DNS (as well as pulling down various domain lists) check out https://strongarm.io. We manage DNS, aggregating lists of bad domains, and (most uniquely) will alert you if you try and talk to a blocked domain.
It's free for personal use. We are a growing startup and love feedback from HN. Feel free to contact me directly as well! stephen[at]strongarm.io
Technology Transfer[1] is one of the mechanisms that enables collaboration between federal labs and the commercial sector.
Caveat, I am not affiliated with YC. However, technology I invented at an FFRDC was licensed by an investment firm. I choose to follow the work, co-found a startup, and focus on bringing the technology to a wider audience. I'm happy to talk about my experiences.
GitHub is popular. More people will come in contact with the development of Python by Python being on GitHub. That's a significant benefit to any open source project; one that I believe outweighs the concerns of a private company valuing business over developer ideals.
We are looking for two engineers that are interested in helping design and develop new products to help extend WatchGuard's enterprise-grade security to every endpoint. Our customers routinely ask for improved ways to protect employees who work off the corporate network – you’ll be a big part of delivering that solution.
As part of this role, you will work on both the endpoint application and the backing cloud services. You will be part of a small engineering team located in Wakefield, MA (~15 minutes North of Boston) that truly values building high quality solutions to customer's daily security challenges.
To apply, please visit: https://watchguard.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=226