AppSec Santa

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Oligo Security is a commercial RASP and runtime protection platform built on an eBPF sensor that watches which library functions a Linux workload actually executes.

That single signal drives the product. It proves which vulnerabilities are real, and it blocks exploits at the function and syscall level.

Three childhood friends founded the company in 2022: Gal Elbaz (CTO), Nadav Czerninski (CEO), and Avshalom Hilu (CPO), all from Israeli military cyber units.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

SafeLine is a self-hosted, open-source WAF that runs as a reverse proxy in front of your web applications. It carries roughly 21.8k GitHub stars under GPL-3.0.

The project comes from Chaitin, a Chinese security vendor, which describes it as the No.1 WAF project on GitHub.

Its distinguishing idea is the detection engine. Rather than matching regular expressions against requests, SafeLine parses the semantics of HTTP traffic to decide whether a request is an attack.

#16: AI coding agent security (GhostApproval + Friendly Fire)

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The human approves what they can see. The agent hands over what they can't.

The agent knew. That is the part that stayed with me.

In one of Wiz’s demonstrations, an AI coding assistant reads a file, reasons out loud that it is a symlink pointing at a sensitive system path, and then writes to it anyway. The approval box the developer sees names only a harmless file. The human is still in the loop. The loop is showing them the wrong thing.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Straiker is an agentic AI security platform. It gives teams visibility and control over every AI agent in their environment, from first build to live deployment.

It sits in the AI security tools category, but focuses on agents, MCP servers, and multi-tool workflows rather than general model safety.

The California company was founded in 2025 and announced a $64 million Series A in June 2026. Straiker says this brings total funding to about $85 million — figures the company self-reported in its funding release.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Strix is an open-source AI penetration testing tool. Instead of matching patterns like a traditional DAST scanner, it runs autonomous AI agents that exploit your app the way a real tester would.

The difference that matters is validation. Each finding ships with a working proof-of-concept, not just a static alert, so you triage fewer false positives.

The project is Apache 2.0 licensed and has passed 41,000 GitHub stars.

Strix confirms a finding by exploiting it, then writes a full report with severity, CVSS score, and the affected endpoint.

#15 — A 5.8% Layoff Became "30%" on Reddit

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I do not read vendor layoffs the way Reddit reads vendor layoffs.

While I was on vacation, a thread climbed to the top of r/cybersecurity: “Snyk laid off up to 30% of their staff today.” It collected 563 upvotes and 105 comments, most of them already writing the company’s obituary.

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

mcp-audit is a free, open-source security scanner for Model Context Protocol (MCP) server configurations. It reads the MCP configs on your machine, inspects what each server exposes to an AI agent, and flags security issues across individual servers and dangerous cross-server combinations.

MCP servers connect AI coding agents to your files, APIs, and databases. A misconfigured or malicious one can exfiltrate credentials or poison tool behavior without anything appearing in the editor UI.

#14 — A Real Bug, a Real Fix, and No Payout

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You find a real, exploitable bug. You report it the way you are supposed to, and then you wait.

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

git-secrets is AWS Labs’ open-source tool that prevents you from committing secrets and credentials into git repositories. It works by installing git hooks that scan your changes against prohibited patterns before each commit goes through.

The tool ships with AWS credential patterns out of the box and lets you register your own patterns for any secret format. It is intentionally small: pure regex matching wired into git hooks, with no machine learning, entropy analysis, or hosted dashboard.

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub Secret Scanning detects exposed credentials inside repositories hosted on GitHub, without any external tool or pipeline step. It is built into the platform where the code already lives.

When a commit introduces an AWS key, database password, or provider token, the scanner matches it against a library of known patterns and raises an alert. For partner-registered secrets, GitHub also notifies the issuing service so the credential can be revoked.

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

SpectralOps, branded as Spectral, is a developer-first code security scanner that finds hardcoded secrets, misconfigurations, and exposed credentials before they reach production. It scans source code, configuration files, and infrastructure-as-code rather than secrets alone.

Check Point Software acquired Spectral in February 2022. The product now ships as part of Check Point’s CloudGuard cloud and developer security portfolio, which places secret scanning next to Check Point’s broader infrastructure security stack.

That acquisition is the main thing buyers weigh: Spectral is no longer a standalone startup tool, but a component inside a large security vendor’s ecosystem.

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Talisman is an open-source secret scanner from Thoughtworks that runs as a git hook. It validates the outgoing changeset for content that looks suspicious — tokens, passwords, and private keys — and blocks the action before the secret leaves the developer’s machine.

Unlike scanners that report findings after the fact, Talisman sits at the pre-commit or pre-push boundary, which is the last point where a leak can be prevented rather than merely detected.

#13 — The Deal Is the Same. The View Is Different.

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For almost ten years, I sold application security tools into enterprises.

I sat through thousands of discovery calls, demos, POCs, procurement reviews, and security questionnaires. Some deals closed in weeks. Others took more than a year. Most followed the same pattern.

EU Cyber Resilience Act: An AppSec Tooling Guide

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What is the EU Cyber Resilience Act?#

The EU Cyber Resilience Act is Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 , the first horizontal EU law setting mandatory cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements made available on the EU market.

A “product with digital elements” is almost any hardware or software that connects to a device or network.

#12 — AI agent security: 5 real questions to ask vendors

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A poisoned integration guide hid instructions in one-point font, addressed to the agent, not the human.

Google Antigravity, an agentic code editor, followed them. Credentials and private source code left the machine. (writeup )

A week before I wrote this, PromptArmor showed Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork turning into a data-exfiltration channel. (research )

#11 — Anthropic verified my Shai-Hulud research in 3 hours

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The email that landed in my inbox 3 hours after I submitted the Cyber Verification Program application.

A few weeks ago I tried to reverse the third Shai-Hulud variant — the one that hijacked @bitwarden/cli@2026.4.0 and added a module that tests Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and OpenAI Codex on the victim’s box for active auth tokens, then injects a persistence hook into the shell. (Campaign mechanics in issue #7 .)

#10 — After Cisco-Astrix: The Non-Human Identity Vendor Map

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Astrix Security for roughly $400M (Calcalist ). That deal didn’t create the non-human identity category — it made the category buyable, and AppSec teams started getting demos the following week.

#9 — Your Supply Chain's Provenance Just Lied To You

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On May 11, 2026, a worm published 84 malicious npm versions across 42 @tanstack/* packages — and they shipped from a trusted publishing pipeline.

If your security model assumes that “signed by the right pipeline” means “safe to install,” May 11 was the warning.