See what an operator does once they believe they have a foothold — separate from your real source and build systems.
Technology and software organizations are targeted for what they hold and what they ship: source code, credentials, and the trust of a software supply chain. HIIH deploys a controlled Surface separate from production assets to present a selected, developer-adjacent exposure, observe credential validation and post-access behavior, and turn it into structured Findings for your existing security and detection-engineering workflows.
Adversaries want the code, the credentials and the trust you ship downstream.
Technology and software organizations attract intellectual-property theft aimed at source code, supply-chain compromise that abuses the trust others place in your releases, and credential theft against developer, build and cloud-adjacent infrastructure. The actors range from access brokers and financially motivated crews to state-aligned operators. What a defender can observe early is the pressure on Internet-facing, developer-adjacent services — the point where an operator first validates access and begins to look around.
Two views usually inform the response, and both begin late.
| Source | What it tells you | Structural limit |
|---|---|---|
| External threat intelligence | broad knowledge of campaigns, actors and infrastructure | not generated for your specific exposure |
| Production telemetry | what touches or executes on real developer and build assets | the adversary is already interacting with something that matters |
| HIIH Surface | what hostile actors bring, test and do against a defined exposure separate from production | relevance is qualified by mission, placement and evidence |
A controlled target-side Surface produces first-party observation of what an operator does after the foothold.
You choose a selected, developer-adjacent exposure profile: the kind of Internet-facing service where an operator first tests credentials and tokens before reaching for code or build systems. An Engagement Gateway directs each session into the controlled environment. Contact Points provide economical breadth, and a Live Host — a full operating-system target an adversary operates inside — preserves the post-access behavior that supports an assessment of likely objectives: session activity, commands, credentials, transferred files, recovered tooling and observed pivot attempts.
Because the observation comes directly from hostile interaction on a Surface deployed for your mission, it is first-party — provenance you can follow, not resold reporting. First-party does not mean every actor was targeting you; how relevant an observation is depends on how the Surface is exposed, and HIIH is built to keep that distinction.
Structured Findings — observations kept separate from assessments, linked to the evidence — that you retrieve into your own tools.
A HIIH Finding is a structured assessment, not a raw tripwire alert: what was observed kept separate from what is assessed, with a stated confidence, a qualified relevance, and the supporting material an analyst can open. A Finding can include ATT&CK mapping where the evidence supports it.
- Observed activity
- Operator establishes a foothold on a Live Host and begins credential and repository-style discovery
- Mission relevance
- Sector-relevant
- Why it matters
- Discovery behavior is consistent with interest in code, credentials and onward access rather than opportunistic noise
- Supporting material
- Session commands, files transferred, credentials used, and tooling recovered during the engagement
- Suggested action
- Update detections for developer-adjacent discovery, and review credential and token exposure on equivalent production systems
- Delivery
- Inspectable in the Surface Console
Delivery is a pull model: your team retrieves HIIH Findings through the Surface Console, MCP or the API, into the tools you already run; STIX 2.1 over TAXII 2.1 is available by engagement. Your workflows remain primary; you retrieve Findings on your terms, and HIIH does not become the system of record by default.
Scope and limits
- HIIH presents a synthetic engagement context; it is not a replica of your source repositories, build pipeline or signing infrastructure, and does not observe a real supply-chain compromise of your organization — it observes adversary behavior against a chosen, separate exposure;
- it sits separate from production assets — beside your environment, not inline in any control path;
- it complements CTI, EDR and SIEM — an additive third source, not a replacement;
- the evidence is supporting material with provenance an analyst can follow, not a cryptographic attestation;
- it is not proof that every source was targeting you, not a compliance certification, and not an offensive or hack-back service.
Bring one technology exposure question that deserves a controlled target-side answer.
Choose the developer-adjacent exposure or post-access question that matters. The Surface, engagement depth, deployment pattern and one delivery workflow path are scoped around it.