Nov 5, 2024

After spending a decade working for appsec vendors, Grant McKracken wanted to give something back. He saw a gap in the market for free or low-cost services for smaller organizations that have real appsec needs, but not a lot of means to pay for it. He founded DarkHorse, who offers VDPs and bug bounties to organizations of all sizes for free, or for as low of cost as possible.

While not a non-profit, the company's goal is to make these services as cheap as possible to increase accessibility for smaller or more budget-constrained organizations. The company has also introduced the concept of "fractional pentesting", access to cyber talent when and how you need it, based on what you can afford. This implies services beyond just offensive security, something we'll dive deeper into in the interview.

We don't see DarkHorse ever competing with the larger Bug Bounty platforms, but rather providing services to the organizations too small for the larger platforms to sell to.

Microsoft delays Recall AGAIN, Project Zero uses an LLM to find a bugger underflow in SQLite, the scourge of infostealer malware, zero standing privileges is easy if you have unlimited time (but no one does), reverse engineering Nintendo's Alarmo and RedBox's... boxes.

Bonus: the book series mentioned in this episode The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell.

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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-306