Yesterday, GreyNoise reached a fun and significant milestone after publishing our 1,337th tag. 1337 is a cherished number in hacker culture, as it is a numerical shorthand for "leet", which itself stands for "elite". This term has deep roots, going all the way back to the 80's when one had to make modems scream to access bulletin board systems (now, we humans are the ones screaming whenever we go online to see what fresh hades awaits us each day).
What makes this milestone even more significant is how it was achieved.
The chart, below, shows the cumulative sum of tag counts by year. While there was a modest improvement in intra-year tag creation from 2022 to 2023, we're just into the first few weeks of Q2 in 2024 and are almost at the total tag count for 2023.
We will almost certainly blow past 2023's tag count well-before the end of Q2, and this has all been made possible by our focused and practical use of AI. This system helps our incredible detection engineers quickly triage the millions of events our sensor fleet absorbs every day. With it, they discover and tag novel payloads to help inform and protect our customers, community, and the internet as a whole. The application that fuels this work is called Sift, and we've waxed poetic about it quite a bit over the past few months.
This boost to the tag inventory has also meant an increase in CVE coverage.
(Since it most likely drew your attention, the jumps in 2022 were due numerous factors, including the increase in Russian hostilities towards Ukraine.)
60% of 2024 tags are based on CVEs, and — along with plenty of "modern" vulnerabilities — Sift has helped us catch exploitation attempts of some very old CVEs, too:
I'm incredibly proud of our team of data scientists, security researchers, and detection engineers. Their leet expertise powers the detections that folks rely on every day, and we hope you'll join in our celebration of achieving this epic milestone!
To learn more about GreyNoise tags and how they differ from "traditional" detections, check out our Tags Webinar Series.
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