Azhar Desai

Software dev @ThinkstCanary. Goes by Az.

@azhardesai.bsky.social

[raeesa pather @raediology]

In 2022, we published Bad Cops, Bad Lawyers to reveal the NPA prosecutors whose decisions enabled state capture, including Chauke.

Later, we focussed on Chauke’s failure to prosecute corruption cases: https://t.co/PjG9FiHIc0

Finally, the President takes action.
@OpenSecretsZA

[Azhar Desai @azhrdesai]

@rad9800 @ThinkstCanary Thanks for coming by and being happy to dig in! Was good chatting.

[raeesa pather @raediology]

Our latest investigation uncovers the estate agents and lawyers who enabled politically connected families to buy luxury homes in SA with dodgy cash from grand corruption.

Join us this Thursday!

[haroon meer @haroonmeer]

Keeping up with security research is tough. Theres a bunch of noise (& not nearly enough signal).

We release ThinkstScapes every quarter to help with this: Our picks of ~20-30 pieces of work that we found interesting (and why).

Its worth checking out..

https://t.co/mHDdO2WFzR

[Thinkst Canary @ThinkstCanary]

Jacob Torrey on stage at @shmoocon just released our new Credit Card Canarytoken.

1) Visit https://t.co/712OurVlda to create ur own legit credit-card;
2) Place it in a data-store of your choice;
3) Get an alert when an attacker runs that card!

Read more:
https://t.co/2W9WJ5gbE6

[raeesa pather @raediology]

#TheUnaccountables is coming!

It's a joy to have written this book with a sterling team. #TheUnaccountables profiles the profiteers of economic crime who remain unaccountable from apartheid to now.

Join @lesterkk, @MikeMarchant13 and myself at The Book Lounge next week.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

God I love this industry.

[raeesa pather @raediology]

Johan van der Merwe led the apartheid police at one of South Africa’s deadliest periods. The TRC estimated almost 14000 people were killed in violence while he was commissioner. He died in August, burying secrets of police atrocities forever. https://t.co/sQqwU6M16e

[Thinkst Canary @ThinkstCanary]

Some commands are overwhelmingly run by attackers on compromised hosts (and seldom ever by regular users in regular usage).

Our @subtee has just released a new (free) Canarytoken to make monitoring these commands trivial.

Read more about it - https://t.co/KXhrlp80li

[raeesa pather @raediology]

In the Zuma-era, there were prosecutors and policemen who carried out dubious investigations. The cases they prosecuted helped to protect state capture. Some of these officials remain employed in the NPA and Hawks, and now lead state capture cases. Read my latest investigation:

[Thinkst Canary @ThinkstCanary]

The 2022-Q2 issue of ThinkstScapes has just been released.

For this issue, we tracked dozens of conferences, over 800 talks & ~150 blog posts.

Grab your PDF copy free¹ at https://t.co/4noer7uyR6 (where you can listen to the audio summary too)

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¹ Free. No reg. No paywall.

[Thinkst Canary @ThinkstCanary]

If you want some light(ish) reading (that doesn't mention Log4J at all) @JacobTorrey has released our Q4-Research-Roundup at https://t.co/4noer7cXsw

It's free, non-paywalled, covers over 300 confs and is a great read/listen.

You can also (finally) subscribe to future releases.

[Azhar Desai @azhrdesai]

Yes, we did build a fake WireGuard to catch stolen keys. And, definitely, it was a lot of fun @thinkstcanary shunting packets safely at scale. We wrote up the story below:

https://t.co/ZHl7v8EP4n

[Thinkst Canary @ThinkstCanary]

A few months ago we released¹ our WireGuard Canarytoken.

Thanks to @azhrdesai that token is now available on our free Canarytoken server (at https://t.co/WCHU95kI8v)

$0.00 && Super Useful!

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¹ https://t.co/goXeOO1HCU

[Azhar Desai @azhrdesai]

@I_Am_VinayakB @CrispianOlver Was that How to Steal a City? Definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year.

[Thinkst Canary @ThinkstCanary]

We are looking for awesome people to help us build products that people love.

If you are (or know):
- a great front-end engineer;
- a snr. full-stack engineer;
- a technical sales-engineer;

Please reach out¹

https://t.co/2ymt1UToHJ

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¹ (We are a pretty great place to work).

[Azhar Desai @azhrdesai]

This week ThinkstScapes returned! It helps you make sense of recent security research with quarterly reviews (I do wish all your other (sub)fields had this too)

https://t.co/pVzVrvgj7z

[Thinkst Canary @ThinkstCanary]

Keeping up with security research is near impossible.
Vendor pitches & bombastic claims add to the noise.

ThinkstScapes fixes this.

Grab quarterly reviews¹ by sec researchers with decades in the field. (PDF or audio)

https://t.co/4noer7uyR6

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¹ Free. Not even reg. needed

[Azhar Desai @azhrdesai]

@AgnesCallard and the intuitionists just need the excluded middle, then I think that’s everyone

[Thinkst Canary @ThinkstCanary]

We are hiring for 2 new positions in our fledgling "Labs".

- One is to help us track, document and distill security research published world wide;

- One is to help us invent new attacks, defenses, tools and utilities.

Check it out and drop us a note:
https://t.co/Amrx7AIeCy

[raeesa pather @raediology]

My thesis won an an award!