TCP #80: Chainguard Assemble, 23AndMeAndYou?, IngressNightmare, and More
🌶️ What's hot in security | Mar. 19th - Mar. 27th, 2025
Welcome to The Cybersecurity Pulse (TCP)! I'm Darwin Salazar, Head of Growth + Marketing at Monad and former detection engineer in big tech. Each week, I dig through all the major headlines to bring you the latest security product innovation and industry news. Subscribe below for weekly updates! 📧
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What’s up y’all!👋🏽
We’re officially within a month of RSA. I’ll be there, will you? Shoot me a DM if you’d like to grab a coffee ☕
Anyhow, lots to cover this week. Few highlights below:
🧬23AndMe files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Data privacy nightmare?
🤯5 ingress-nginx vulnerabilities being dubbed “IngressNightmare” (CVSS 9.8)
🎯Gili Raanan’s Cyberstarts investment playbook
💰Wiz’s $32B GTM Playbook
🐙Key Chainguard Assemble Product Launches
🏃🏽♂️RunZero brings to market the most comprehensive exposure management solution
Let’s cyber 🕺🏽
⚒️ Picks of the Week ⚒️
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23andMe Just Filed for Bankruptcy. You Should Delete Your Data Now.
The DNA testing company announced on Sunday that they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is looking for a buyer. This comes after a significant data breach in 2023. Apparently most of DNA testing companies are not subject to HIPAA laws so this could turn into a pretty big data privacy nightmare. DNA testing tech has become ubiquitous, but the true prize for whoever acquires the company's assets will be the DNA or rather the "IP".
The NY Times published a small guide here on how to delete your data if you're 23AndMe customer.
Wiz’s $32B GTM Playbook: Unpacking the Formula (Part I)
I recently kicked off a series dissecting Wiz's Go-To-Market (GTM) playbook. Following first principles, the first part focuses on their early days, finding Product-Market Fit and how they nailed branding.
To me, Wiz had one of the best GTM runs of any B2B companies in recent history so it's worth analyzing their tactics and strategies to see what the rest of us can learn and apply. Part II landing within the next week, subscribe to make sure you don't miss it!
The Wiz research team recently discovered a series of unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes (K8s). Exploitation of the vulns lead to unauthorized access to all secrets across all namespaces in the K8s cluster which could result in a cluster takeover. The severity of the vulns landed it a 9.8 CVSS score.
Wiz has an awesome, in-depth report on the end-to-end lifecycle of the 5 vulns here. If you're org. runs any k8s, I'd recommend sharing the report to ensure the latest ingress-nginx version are running, if at all. In the best case, they already patched, but never hurts to make sure :)
Side note: These are the very type of research reports and vuln discoveries that has brought Wiz lots of respect and notoriety in the security community.
This masterpiece by
and (Former CISO @ Netflix) dives into many of the dilemmas that security founders face in building a startup. They cover topics like:Differentiation vs. speed to market
Time to value vs. moat
Platform vs. best of breed
And more
Certainly worth a read if you're building something in cyber! 💎
Great pod that dives into Gili's investment thesis and 'Sunrise' playbook with Cyberstarts. If you don't know Gili, he's a legend in the VC space (i.e., $6.4M -> $1.3B in recent Wiz deal) and has been pivotal in building some of the biggest cyber startups in recent years.
What stood out to me most is that the average Cyberstarts portfolio company spends about $100M in R&D budget over 3 years 🤯🤯🤯🤯 (~Min. 29 on Spotify)
🔮 The Future of Security 🔮
Application Security
Key Chainguard Assemble Announcements
Chainguard just had their first annual user conference, Assemble, and made more than a few significant announcements. Their flagship product is Chainguard Containers and is loved by many dev teams across the globe including Snowflake, Anduril, Canva etc. Simply put, they provide secure-by-design container images which removes so much of the toil AppSec + Dev teams face in hardening open-source images.
At Assemble, they introduced two more product offerings:
Chainguard VM - Minimal, zero-CVE virtual machine images built from source, designed for modern, ephemeral cloud workloads. They serve as secure container host images, offering a cloud-agnostic, threat-resistant environment to deploy and run containers.
Chainguard Libraries - Guarded catalog of language libraries, focusing on protecting against supply chain attacks by providing developers with secure, vulnerability-free libraries for their apps.
Kudos to the Chainguard team👏. They've built a product and an approach to software supply chain security that circumvents a lot of traditional threat vectors and in turn, make their customer's lives much easier.
More AppSec news ⬇️
JFrog’s Conan introduces Conan Audit to strengthen C/C++ dependency security
Hunted Labs lands $3M to find suspicious open source contributors
Pulumi Extends Security Reach to Include Managing Secrets and Policy-as-Code
Browser Security
Island Raises $250M in Series E; Valued Nearly $5 Billion
Island, a leader in the Enterprise Browser space, has raised a $250M Series E bringing it's total valuation to $5B. Round was led by Coatue Management. Company came out of stealth in Feb. '22 and is a rocketship. Existing investors include Canapi Ventures, Capital One Ventures, Cisco Investments, Citi Ventures, Coatue Management, Cyberstarts, EDBI, Georgian, Insight Partners, Prysm Capital, Sequoia Capital, ServiceNow Ventures, and Stripes.
Cloud Security
ARMO recently launched their Behavioral Cloud Application Detection and Response (CADR) solution that unifies runtime security from code to cloud. It's a novel approach in that it provides a full, explainable and traceable runtime security story/context spanning the entire stack. My friend, James Berthoty explains the significance best:
"In all other tools, this alert comes up as "process started on container" - but if you're an incident responder, this kicks off an endless bug the developers game: "hey guys, did you do this or is this supposed to do this?"
Only with the application context can you see - "woah, this is a SQL injection and a real attack, we need to fix this, block the IP, and get to work stopping the attack!"" -
atGovernance, Risk, and Compliance
The feature is meant to simplify vendor security reviews by supporting direct collab between security teams and 3rd party vendors. Think TPRM questionnaires, evidence gathering, and automating follow-ups.
The launch comes on the heels of Drata's acquisition of SafeBase which played squarely in this space.
Identity Security
GetReal Security Raises $17.5M in Series A Funding
GetReal Security, which focuses on detecting + mitigating malicious GenAI threats including deepfakes and impersonation attacks, has raised a $17.5M Series A round. The round was led by Forgepoint Capital with participation from Baliistic, Evolution Equity, the K2 Access Fund, In-Q-Tel, Cisco Investments, and CapitalOne Ventures.
GenAI has gotten very good and will only continue improving. The deepfake threat is real and can have material impact if exploited against VIPs. Great to see companies in the space getting the proper funding.
More Identity Security news ⬇️
Security Operations
Microsoft Gives Security Copilot Some Autonomy
Haven't dug too much into this announcement, but it seems like these releases give it some feature parity with the leading AI for SecOps tools like Intezer and Prophet Security.
More Security Operations news ⬇️
Vulnerability Management
RunZero Introduces a New Era for Exposure Management
RunZero, founded by HD Moore (founder of Metasploit), recently launched their exposure management solution and in my opinion, it's the most comprehensive CASM/EASM solution on the market by a mile. Watch this video to get a gist of what they're up to:
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Bye For Now!
That’s all for this week… ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana! 👋🏽
Disclaimer
The insights, opinions, and analyses shared in The Cybersecurity Pulse are my own and do not represent the views or positions of my employer or any affiliated organizations. This newsletter is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice.