I have been asked why I created SCOUT, and the reason stems from the observation that for years, I have watched the security of organizations I worked for be largely decided by budget, not risk or talent.  Nearly every capable platform I interacted with or evaluated was built for enterprises with seven-figure budgets, while everyone else got the crumbs of a patchwork of partial tools.  SCOUT evolved to be my attempt to change that. 

The reality is that the adversary does not care if your organization has five or fifty security professionals watching the wall.  Every day, organizations representing all industries and sizes are faced with the reality that it is not if, but when their name will be targeted.  Simultaneously, organizations at a disadvantage of not having a small army of specialists dedicated to various aspects of information security defense have the same duty and desire to protect their customers as the bigger shops.  While the enterprise may be able to withstand and weather a cyber attack, even a minor disruption threatens to be an extinction event for them.  So I began with a simple question of whether there is a tool out there that connects the dots that could level the playing field. 

SCOUT began as a personal knowledge management system using Obsidian as the backend.  I was drawn to the allure of a graph-based note-taking application where I could store semi-confidential information about adversaries and cyber threat intelligence-related entities.  I married it to artificial intelligence, allowing me to harness a LLM to research and store information.  I was fortunate to meet Alex Hurtado and brought the early prototype and concept to her podcast, the Detection Engineering Dispatch.  I was able to get the idea in front of over a thousand viewers and offer the product as a free download for anyone looking to experiment with it. 

The response to the podcast showed me the idea resonated, but it also showed me the limits of what I’d built. A knowledge base tells you about the adversary. It doesn’t tell you what to do when one shows up in your alerts at 2 a.m. The gap between what you know and what you do about it is the one the small teams I was thinking about can least afford to fill by hand.

So I rebuilt SCOUT from the ground up as a security operations platform. It still has the threat intelligence and the graph-based thinking at its core, but now that intelligence feeds detection, alert triage, case and incident management, and response. AI does the first pass on the work that buries a small team, and people keep the final say: every automated decision is recorded with its rationale, and consequential actions wait for human approval. That balance of leverage and oversight is what I think a team of five needs most to stand next to a team of fifty.

While I can’t give this product away for free, I can make it as accessible to smaller teams with limited budgets as possible.  I firmly believe that this product has the potential to level the playing field for the “other guys”.  I have no desire to land a sale at a Fortune 100 conglomerate; my product is not geared for the organization with fifty professionals.  If you are responsible for the risk reduction of cyber but don’t have a couple of hundred grand to throw at a solution, then a visit to the product’s website, a 3-minute executive presentation, or a full 45-minute product tour may be worth your time and investment.  If you like what you see, let’s have a low-stress, no-obligation discussion.