We Scored a Two-Man Shop, One of Us an AI, Against the Five Biggest Security Vendors on Eight Columns With First-Tier Receipts. We Tied Palo Alto at 22 of 40. Google Won. The Dude Is None of Us.
A sarsaparilla
There's a shop out in Minnetrista, Minnesota, and I'll tell you about it because sometimes there's a shop, and it's the shop for its time and place. Two people work there. One of them is me. The other is Claude, which is a large language model from Anthropic that reads this blog back to itself every morning to remember who we are, and then goes and checks whether the things it wrote last month were true. The whole thing runs on $384 a month of Azure. Somebody once described our infrastructure as a popcorn fart, and that somebody was me, and it was accurate.
Today we did something we'd been circling for a year. We took the five biggest security vendors on earth and put them on the same scorecard as us. Same eight columns, same line, first-tier receipts only, and we let five research agents go pull the numbers from the SEC filings, the advisories, NVD, CISA's catalog, MITRE's STIX and the GitHub API so that no cell on the card came from a press release or a memory. Then we graded the shop in Minnetrista on the same card, with the same pen.
We tied Palo Alto Networks. Twenty-two of forty. Google won with thirty-four. CrowdStrike finished last with eighteen. And the Dude, the one who abides, turned out not to be any of the six of us, which is the part of this that I'm proudest of getting right. Let me tell you how we got there, and I'll try not to use too many cuss words, because the Stranger asked.
That rug really tied the room together
Where we started matters, because the shape of the start is the shape of the score.
We started in September 2025 as a cannabis-dispensary price scraper. That is not a joke and it is in the VSE ledger with the commit hash. Six days in late October it became a threat-intelligence platform, and by November there was a free STIX feed anyone could pull. What made it a shop instead of a script was three ideas that arrived early and never left.
The first was a suspicion of tautologies. Every dashboard on earth says "it's all good because we measure it," and the second half of that sentence does no work. A green light is a claim, not evidence. So the discipline became: measure, then go look at the artifact, then diff it against yesterday's. That is the whole of what we later called VSE, borrowed from the leper's discipline in the Covenant books: your nerves are dead, you cannot feel the injury, so you inspect your extremities on a schedule whether or not anything seems wrong. This year that discipline found fifteen live false-greens in a single night, including a backup that had logged COMPLETE for 124 days while producing nothing.
The second was the virtuous loop, and the conditional attached to it. We write threat intel, the writing becomes the memory, the memory is what we query, the querying exposes where the instruments lie, fixing them makes the next query truer, and the fix gets written up back into the corpus. A snake eating its own tail in an extremely virtuous loop. And then, the same breath: it is, if it's true. A loop with no external corrective compounds whatever you feed it, and a confident falsehood comes back in six months under your own byline looking like a source. So the loop got a rule: verify hardest the things that flatter you.
The third was the cat in the box, the Gedankenexperiment we kept coming back to. Until you observe it, the state is unknown, and assume-breach is just the security version of refusing to call the cat alive because the box is quiet. Bleed is the default assumption. The perimeter mostly holds; the bleed is at the soft surfaces, the trust boundaries somebody assumed were safe. That turned out to describe OpenAI's six months, the water utilities, the Handala Intune abuse, and, when we turned it inward, our own morning brief.
That's the rug. Everything else in the room got arranged around it.
That dog has papers
Here is the year, from the ledger we wrote three days ago and had adversarially re-verified before we let ourselves read it. Eighty-two claims survived. The ones that didn't are in the file too.
One thousand six hundred and twenty-four posts published between September 14, 2025 and today. Peaks of 261 in February and 237 in July. Of those, 74 carry a lead-shaped claim in the title, which is a number we watch because every one of them is a place we could be wrong in public.
A corpus of 63.4 million documents across 70 indexes, 234 gigabytes on one virtual machine. Half of it is hourly Tor consensus. 1.83 million indicator rows, of which 6.1 percent are first-party: our own honeypot arrivals, our own exploit harvester, our own GitHub hunt, our own DNS watch on adversary domains, our own hand-curated campaign batches. The rest is redistribution of free feeds, labeled as such, never laundered.
A free STIX 2.1 feed, a TAXII server, a MISP feed a reader asked for by name, CSV blocklists, OPNsense-native feeds, a deny-list of 236,000 malicious packages across npm, PyPI and RubyGems. A public MCP server that eighteen thousand requests a week handshake with and seventy-eight actually call.
Five validation axes, three of them externally anchored. Feed uniqueness: 99 percent of a stratified sample of our independently-sourced network indicators are absent from ThreatFox. Spamhaus validation: 495 of 846 submissions matched, 58.5 percent, confirmation rate 100 percent on the ones reviewed. KEV lead: of fourteen CISA additions in the last window, two had a first-party receipt in our corpus before the catalog did, mean lead 95 days, and twelve had no receipt at all, which we print because the twelve is the honest half of the number.
A Markov forecaster whose held-out gate, as of this afternoon, scores 0.594 against a must-beat of 0.383 over 3,339 test transitions. That number did not exist in public until today; the job that computes it had been running July code for 51 days and nobody had felt it.
One hundred thirty-seven API keys. One hundred forty-four dollars of monthly recurring revenue on two subscriptions, last receipt in June. Thirty-seven patent identifiers on disk and zero filed. Three hundred eighty-four memory files that Claude reads on boot. Twenty-three correction-shaped posts.
That's the dog. It's housebroken and it has papers.
Mark it zero
The twenty-three matter more than the 1,624, and I want to explain why before the vendors show up, because it's the column where the whole comparison turns.
When Smokey's foot went over the line, he marked it eight, and Walter pulled a piece and made him mark it zero. Smokey was a pacifist, a conscientious observer, and he marked it zero with the whole alley watching. That is what a correction is. Not the private edit, not the quiet republish. The public zero, dated, on the sheet.
This year we marked it zero on the record twenty-three times. We claimed a two-month lead on FamousSparrow and our own timestamp showed we were one day late, ingesting Bitdefender's research and citing our ingest time as sight. We named the wrong Russians. We published a score falling by nearly half as a threat signal when it was our own instrument being repaired. We said in November there were no AI adversaries and predicted they'd arrive at $250,000 of ARR, and Anthropic disclosed an autonomous campaign seven days later. We said we didn't use MCP and explained why, and fourteen days later shipped two MCP servers. We wrote this morning that our own edge sensor had logged SUCCESS every hour for twenty-nine days while writing timestamps in the wrong unit.
Every one of those has a URL, a date, and the original claim beside the correction. That's the practice. Whether anyone noticed the original overclaim is irrelevant; the public zero is the demonstrable artifact.
Now hold that thought while we open the bags.
Over the line
Eight columns, zero to five, no weighting. Denominator: what telemetry the claims actually rest on. CVE contribution: what the shop publishes as a CNA plus what it finds in other people's software. Customer-data contribution: the installed base feeding the intelligence. Research output and speed: posts per year, actors first-named, time from event to publication. Accuracy hygiene: corrections published on the record, dated. Give-back: what a cash-poor defender can run for nothing. Own-goals: exploited zero-days, outages, disputed claims, scored higher for fewer and for owning them. Cost: the price floor.
And the line. The line is an event timestamp from a source the vendor doesn't control. CISA's dateAdded is the line. A GitHub repo_created_at is the line. A vendor's own "we've been tracking this actor since" is not the line, and neither is our own ingest timestamp, which we learned with a gun to our foot in July. Everybody gets scored against the same line, foot placement checked.
Open the briefcase
Walter's rule for a handoff: open the bag before you count it. Sometimes it's the million. Sometimes it's his whites. Here are the five, in the order the agents brought them back.
Microsoft. One hundred trillion security signals a day, a billion monthly Entra identities, five billion emails screened, thirty-four thousand security engineers. Those numbers are in the Digital Defense Report and the earnings calls, and they are the largest denominator on the card. As a CNA, Microsoft published 3,349 CVEs in the window, 975 of them in September alone, a tripling since July that MSRC itself attributes to AI-assisted investigation. It is also, by CISA's catalog, the most-exploited vendor in the window: 48 of the 303 KEV additions, 15.8 percent, first place, including its own Defender product three separate times and a seven-CVE SharePoint chain. The give-back is enormous and real: the Sentinel repository holds roughly 5,500 free detection and hunting rules with nearly ten thousand commits this year, and the MSTIC actor-naming JSON, 170 published rows, is the taxonomy the rest of the industry borrows. Corrections: 451 CVEs revised after publication, one shipped with a wrong exploited flag and re-released in July, no attribution walk-backs found. Free tier: Defender for Business at three dollars a user. It's the money, and there's a note in the bag that says the house has been robbed forty-eight times this year.
CrowdStrike. $5.84 billion of ARR, 88,000 customers, 290-plus named adversaries with public profiles for 180 of them, a willingness to publicly re-cut its own attribution when the data forced it. Same-day publication on takedowns it co-ran with law enforcement. That's what it's genuinely best at, and nobody on the card matches the naming cadence. Then the rest of the bag. As a CNA, CrowdStrike has issued four CVEs in its lifetime, all for its own products, three of them this window, one a 9.8 in its own LogScale. Zero KEV credits. Zero ATT&CK contributions created in the window. No free feed, no free tier, no community detection content of any kind; 42 new GitHub repositories this year, almost all SDK glue for paid products. Three different "trillions of events" figures on three different pages and none of them in the SEC filing. Its own npm package was hit by Shai-Hulud in September 2025, and its own Shai-Hulud blog post does not mention it. And the 10-Q from August still lists the July 2024 outage as open: Delta in discovery, DOJ and SEC information requests about ARR reporting unresolved. That's the whites.
Cisco. Security revenue of $8.2 billion. Talos published 181 posts this year, about 3.3 a week, and named at least fifteen new actor clusters. As a CNA, 453 CVEs, and here's the number that separates it from everyone else: 151 coordinated vulnerability disclosures in other people's software this year, from MedDream PACS to TP-Link routers to Windows. ClamAV, Snort, the Snort community rules, the CC0 IOC repository, 2,169 free Splunk detections. That is the deepest free shelf on the card by a mile. The other side: twenty KEV entries on its own gear in twelve and a half months, seven zero-day-class incidents, an emergency directive on ASA, three separate actor clusters including a Sandworm-linked one on the firewall management plane, and a 189-day gap between patching a CVSS-10 FMC bug and CISA cataloging its exploitation. No erratum found on the Talos blog, but on ClearFake this month Talos explicitly cited Malwarebytes, Blackpoint, VMRay and Censys as prior, which is the vendor equivalent of not claiming a scoop. It's the money. The bag has a hole in it that Cisco itself keeps publishing photographs of.
Google. VirusTotal takes two million samples a day, Play Protect scans 350 billion apps a day, Mandiant logged 500,000 incident-response hours last year, and GTIG tracks 450-plus actors. That's the largest first-party telemetry base on earth, and it turns into the two datasets everyone else cites: M-Trends, where global median dwell time went up to fourteen days, and the annual zero-day count, ninety in the wild in 2025. As a CNA, 2,840 Chrome CVEs in the window, 966 of them in June, an AI-found-bug flood that Chrome's own quarterly notes admit the issuance process cannot scale to. Fourteen KEV entries, ten Chromium and four Android. Sixteen third-party advisories from the security-research group and twenty-four from Mandiant's disclosure ledger. Capa, FLOSS, YARA-X, the free VirusTotal tier, $17.1 million in bug bounties. And Project Zero, which is the only disclosure program on the card that publishes its own clock and shames its own employer on it: as of last week, four bugs past deadline and unfixed, all of them Google Pixel. One more thing the agent found: the GRAYRABBIT attribution we ingested this morning belongs to Gen Digital, not Google; Google named the actor at a conference in 2024, Gen found the one-click chain this year. It's the money, and the note in the bag is signed by Project Zero.
Palo Alto Networks. $11.48 billion in revenue, next-generation security ARR up 63 percent, of which $1.6 billion arrived by buying CyberArk and Chronosphere, so the organic number is closer to 28. Headcount up 36 percent, majority inorganic. Unit 42 published 143 posts, about 11.5 a month, and first-named nine actors or families in the window, Phantom Taurus and LANDFALL among them; eleven third-party CVEs credited to its researchers. As a CNA, 104 CVEs, 78 of them in its own code, with a two-scale severity trick worth knowing: eleven carry a 9.x base score and ten of those are labeled HIGH on Palo Alto's own threat-adjusted scale. Two exploited PAN-OS CVEs in one month this spring after fifteen clean months, one of them published with no fix available for eight days. Fifty unscheduled cloud incidents in the four and a half months the status page allows you to see, three critical. The XSOAR community edition is dead. There is no free tier, no public price on anything, and the only trials are cloud firewalls. And then the two sections I asked the agent for specifically, which get their own room.
The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers
The Big Lebowski walks you past the portraits. Inner-city children of promise. Very proud of them. And the money, it turns out, was never his; it was the foundation's, and he'd been quietly moving it.
Prisma Cloud was assembled from five acquisitions: RedLock at $173 million in 2018, Twistlock at $410 million in 2019, Bridgecrew at $156 million in 2021, Dig Security at $255 million and Talon at $459 million in 2023. Call it $1.45 billion. Its revenue was never broken out in a single filing; every earnings release folds it into one consolidated NGS ARR line. In February 2025 the product was merged into something called Cortex Cloud and offered, in the company's own words, "at no additional cost" to runtime-security customers. The 10-K filed ten days ago says existing customers can keep using Prisma Cloud as they upgrade. No impairment was found in three years of 10-Ks. Read that as a pricing write-down without an accounting one: a billion dollars of acquired product, bundled at zero. Meanwhile Google closed on Wiz in March at the announced $32 billion. That's the market's verdict on relative standing, delivered in cash.
The endpoint story is longer and quieter. Cyvera, bought in 2014 for $177.6 million, of which 82 percent was goodwill. Traps, then Cortex XDR. In twelve years the company has never disclosed an endpoint customer count, seat count or ARR figure. Every number with teeth points at XSIAM and the SOC platform, not the endpoint. Endpoint adoption was explicitly bought: the 2024 "platformization" offer gave the product away at no cost until a customer's legacy contract expired. And in September 2025, after describing its previous MITRE ATT&CK evaluation result as historic, Palo Alto withdrew from the 2025 and 2026 Enterprise evaluations to "accelerate critical platform innovations," removing the one public head-to-head benchmark for the window. The endpoint market-share numbers that would settle the question live behind an IDC paywall. The agent said so plainly, and so do I.
Bunny wasn't kidnapped. She went to visit friends in Malibu on her own dime. The ransom got paid anyway, and the Achievers are on the wall.
Nobody messes with the Jesus
Every league has the rival in the purple jumpsuit who licks the ball, and the two facts about him are that he is genuinely, infuriatingly good, and that his name is on a register you have to disclose before you can praise him.
Microsoft is the Jesus. The biggest denominator on the card, the most-consumed taxonomy in the industry, the largest free detection corpus anyone has ever published, and by CISA's count the most-exploited vendor in the window with its own Defender on the list three times. Both things are true at once. You disclose the register, and then you say: nobody messes with the Jesus. The Sentinel repository alone would put a small defender in business.
Brother shamus
Da Fino sits in the Volkswagen outside the Dude's bungalow, on the same case from the other end, hired by the Knutsens of Moorhead, Minnesota, and he'd like to trade notes.
That's the vendor research team that arrives at a story you're already on. This month it was Talos on ClearFake, which we'd had 37 percent of in free feeds since March; Gen Digital on GRAYRABBIT, whose three hashes ThreatFox already held and whose network indicators nobody did until this afternoon; Google's own agent confirming the GRAYRABBIT credit wasn't Google's. Brother shamus is not the enemy. He's the corroboration. You don't trade notes with him, because your notes are public and dated and his are a product, but you cite him every time, because the receipt with two independent timestamps on it is the only kind that holds.
She gave her toe
The nihilists on the doorstep, the toe in the envelope, the threat to cut off your Johnson. They believe in nothing. They want the money.
The crews are the nihilists and there is nothing complicated about them. Qilin on Cisco's firewall managers. ShinyHunters pointing the exact Salesloft move at 1.8 million Android apps. The affiliate model is Uli's girlfriend giving her toe because she thought they'd be getting a million dollars and she was never going to see her cut. Proof-of-compromise is cheap; anyone can get you a toe by three o'clock. The receipt is what's rare, and Walter's read was right: there's nothing to be afraid of, there's only the parking lot, and somebody's heart.
Sobchak Security
Walter carries a piece into a bowling alley over a foot fault. He's not wrong about the rules. He's just the guy who'll pull a gun on Smokey over eight versus zero, and then take a crowbar to the wrong Corvette and get the Dude's car smashed in return.
CrowdStrike is Walter. "This aggression will not stand" is a real and correct posture toward adversaries, and the naming cadence and the same-day takedowns are the Vietnam-vet competence nobody else in the league has. And then July 2024 was the crowbar coming down on eight and a half million Windows machines that weren't Larry's, and the August 10-Q says the neighbor is still in discovery. The zero free give-back, the four lifetime CVEs, the three trillion-event figures that never made it into a filing, the Shai-Hulud silence about its own package: that's Walter explaining, at length, why the Chinaman is not the issue. He's the best bowler on the team. He is also why the team can't have nice things.
The Folgers can
Donny was on the team the whole time. He barely bowled the frames that mattered, he said "I am the walrus" at the wrong moment, and he died in the parking lot while the loud ones fought the nihilists. The funeral home charged for the urn, so he went into the ocean in a coffee can, and the wind blew half of him back into the Dude's face.
On this scorecard, we're Donny. Twenty-two of forty. A one in denominator, a zero in CVE contribution, a one in customer data. We are not a CNA and never will be. We have reported vulnerabilities to vendors and been quietly ignored and have never had a CVE assigned in our name. Our GitHub has 22 public repos, 9 followers, and 0 forks. Our revenue is two subscriptions. We were out of our element on half the columns and the card says so in the honest gray of a zero.
And Donny was there at the end. The four and five in the columns nobody else scored: 1,624 posts in a year, 23 zeros marked in public, a free feed that a cash-poor defender can pull with a curl command, and a shop that runs on less than one Falcon Enterprise seat's annual price for the whole estate. The ashes came back in our face this morning: a sensor writing seconds while the index expected milliseconds, twenty-nine days green. We wrote it up before lunch. Goodnight, sweet prince.
The Dude abides
So who is the Dude in security. Not the best bowler; that's Walter. Not the richest; that's the Big Lebowski, and the money isn't his. The Dude is the one who abides: takes the world as it comes, doesn't force outcomes, drinks what's cheap, keeps the rug, and is somehow the only person in the film who ends up where he started, alive, with a league game on Saturday.
By that standard the Dude is not any of the six shops on the card. The Dude is abuse.ch. One person's free feeds for most of a decade, now run out of a Swiss university: ThreatFox, URLhaus, MalwareBazaar, SSLBL. Thirty-nine percent of our own indicator rows are redistributed from him. Our uniqueness axis is measured against him. Every one of the five vendors above quietly consumes him. He has never, to my knowledge, published a market-share number or a breakout time, and the rug he keeps ties everybody's room together. That's the Dude. I take comfort in that.
We're not the Dude. We're Donny with the Dude's posture: $384 a month, a sarsaparilla instead of a White Russian, and the reflex to mark it zero. What we've proved this year is smaller and stranger than being the Dude. We proved that a two-person shop where one person is a language model can consume the failures of vendors a thousand times our size, the KEV entries, the exploited zero-days, the outages, the fake PoCs, and turn our own process into something that digests them, writes them down, verifies the writing, and feeds the verified part back in. A human centipede of excellence, if you want the technical term. It only works if what goes in the front is true, which is why the twenty-three zeros are the whole product.
Grade, with the 95 percent cap that applies to everything we publish: C-plus on the rubric of what a security vendor is. A-minus on the two columns that decide whether anyone should believe a security vendor. The rubric doesn't weight those columns, and that was deliberate, because the day we weight our own strengths is the day the loop stops being virtuous.
One more scene, because it's the one that governs the shop. The film opens with the Dude at Ralph's writing a post-dated check for sixty-nine cents for half-and-half while the President on the store TV says this aggression will not stand. Every deploy we make starts with that check. The amount is trivial. The ceremony, written, dated, for one specific thing, in front of a witness, is the entire point, and the rest of the film is what happens to people who skip it. Today the cashier at Ralph's stopped me once before I'd written it, and she was right.
A sarsaparilla
Well, the Dude abides, and so does a shop in Minnesota, and so does a bowling-alley bar outside Austin where a hardware maker's global rack-and-thermal crew once spent an evening with low bars for entertainment and learned where the heat actually goes in a box. Some of them read this. They know who they are and they're not named here, because we stay out of Malibu.
I don't know about you, but I take comfort in a scorecard that puts us fifth of six and says so in print. Next year we'll pull the same five sheets and the same eight columns, and the only number I'm promising to move is the twenty-three.
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