When the leadership team at Stamus Networks got together to capture the core principles of our company, we answered three questions which defined who we are as an organization:
These questions helped us identify the six core principles which guide the way we operate, the people we want to serve, and how we serve them. For a more thorough overview of the process and why we developed our core principles, read the introduction to this series.
The core principle we review today not only helps answer all three of the previous questions, but should also give more insight into other values we hold as a company.
Embrace Open Interfaces and Open Source
Stamus Networks has deep roots in the open source community. Our founders, Peter Manev and Eric Leblond, were early contributors to Suricata, are actively involved in the leadership of the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF), and are frequent educators to the Suricata community. They, in addition to the rest of our team, continue to stay involved in open source news, events, and forums. In fact, we are so passionate about open source, that we built an entire business out of it.
In the early years, Stamus Networks released Scirius, an open source threat hunting interface, and SELKS, an open source turn-key Suricata based IDS/IPS/NSM solution. These projects became the foundation of our commercial system, Stamus Security Platform, which offers a more comprehensive network detection and response (NDR) solution for larger organizations. And we continue to enhance, support, and encourage outside contributions today.
More recently, we introduced several other open source projects, including GopherCap, Stamus App for Splunk, and the Suricata Language Server. In all these cases, we create and nurture these projects as resources for small businesses, education, training, casual home network defenders, hobbyists, or anyone else who is interested in using open source network security tools.
Our passion for “open” goes beyond our free resources. We recognize that our Stamus Security Platform is not the only tool in our customers' security tech stack. And in order for organizations to take advantage of best-of-breed technologies, we believe it's imperative to provide open interfaces that enable straightforward integration with other systems such as SOAR, SIEM, EDR, XDR, and Incident response systems. In addition, we allow our customers to incorporate threat intelligence from outside sources so they can optimize the deployment for their particular environment.
All of this is because we genuinely believe that open source is a critically important tool for the defender and open interfaces are the easiest way for our customers to incorporate our system into their existing stack. Cybersecurity professionals around the world should strive to share tools and resources with each other so that they can be better prepared when a threat does emerge. Open source and open interfaces are one way to promote that.
Conclusion
While we work hard to continue development of our open interface commercial platform, we also strive to improve our open source offerings as well. At Stamus Networks, our involvement in the open source community is just as important to us as the solutions we provide to our customers . We do this because these solutions not only help to create a more efficient defense-oriented tech stack, but also improve defenders’ ability to effectively protect their organizations.
To learn more about Stamus Networks’ open source projects, click here.