The past year of supply chain attacks has impacted GitHub, LiteLLM, Axios, Cisco, Mercor, SAP, Daemon Tools, UiPath, Mistral, OpenAI, and many others. They have been a wake-up call for the industry and have highlighted the importance of securing the entire ecosystem.
More than ever, staying secure is a collective effort. All it takes is one weak link for things to go awry. The rapid proliferation of insecure AI infrastructure and vibe coded apps has added fuel to the fire. In other words, every security practitioner, risk manager, and insurance company has a vested interest in raising the collective bar for cybersecurity.
This is why the cyber industry needs to come together and democratize access to essential cybersecurity tooling.
Cybersecurity for every company
For a long time, good security has been the domain of the largest companies. It’s been a story of the haves and have nots: enterprises have been motivated by risk management with budgets to match while smaller businesses have largely been motivated by revenue driven compliance.
This spurred an “entry level” security stack developed around the compliance use case. While a sensible approach at the time, and not discrediting the contribution it’s made to security, compliance has increasingly become more disconnected from real security outcomes. Despite this, being secure and being compliant are often wrongly conflated as the same thing.
The problem compounds if you’re not a massive corporation. Enterprise grade solutions have long been inaccessible to small and medium-sized businesses that face the same risks as their enterprise counterparts, but have budgets and headcount a fraction of the size. Our Security Middle Child Report found as much: 46% of midmarket security teams say enterprise-focused platforms assume more staff, budget, or complexity than they can support. Furthermore, 29% say the tools built for small and medium-sized enterprises no longer meet their needs.
To make it even worse, the procurement processes some vendors create become needlessly high stakes.Your security tools are arguably the most important part of your tech stack, and yet they’re not easy to get right. You spend months sitting through demos, negotiating rates, and onboarding, only to realize that the cybersecurity tool is missing something or, worse, the cybersecurity tool missed something. High price tags, slow procurement processes, and a concerning reluctance from many vendors to let you try first is a bad combination.
Compliance standards will evolve, but that change will inevitably take a long time given how slowly regulatory bodies move. While we wait, democratizing access to enterprise grade security tooling for smaller attack surfaces is a logical place to focus.
Free plans from reputable companies
The best security tooling has been gated behind enterprise sales processes and eye-watering price tags. We’ve patched that flaw with the introduction of our free plan and the promise to make continuous, proactive security accessible for the 99%.
Cybersecurity has long been a community-based industry. For years, we’ve relied on open-source software to power key parts of our platform. We build on and around open-source tools to make them better for our customers. This free plan is a way to give back to the community.
We are a mostly bootstrapped company, meaning that we don’t have millions of venture capital dollars to pour into sales and marketing. Instead, we have built a product that is genuinely helping organizations, earning the trust of over 3,000 security and IT teams.
We want to earn our place in your tech stack. That’s why we’ve committed to making our tech available for free, forever.
What you get for free
If your security and IT teams are stretched thin, under-resourced, and constantly playing catch-up, start with a 14-day trial of our Cloud plan so you can put Intruder to work across your environment and surface real risks. When the trial ends, if you’re not ready to commit, we’ll move you to our free plan, which is designed for companies that need to protect their small attack surface, but don’t yet have the budget for full enterprise tooling. You can keep your core coverage for as long as it suits you, no credit card required, for up to three people in the same workspace.
____
About Chris Wallis
Chris Wallis is Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Intruder. He has previously worked as Senior Security Specialist at WorldPay, Lead Security Consultant at Context Information Security and Security Consultant at Deloitte. Chris is an alumnus of the University of Bath.
Join our LinkedIn group Information Security Community!
