Hunted Labs lands $3M to find suspicious open source contributors

Former NSA deputy director George Barnes has made his first investment as a venture capitalist for his new job at the VC incubation studio Red Cell Partners. It’s a $3 million seed deal in an open source cybersecurity startup called Hunted Labs, he told TechCrunch exclusively. Barnes spent his entire 35-year career at the spy agency, starting as an engineer, traveling from cushy assignments in places like London to war zones, he said. He worked as deputy director from 2017 to 2023. During that time, the “NSA had positioned itself to actually penetrate our adversaries,” he told TechCrunch. That ability to hack, “really prepares you to be a better defender,” he said adding that this is why the NSA is so good at “finding vulnerabilities and zero days.” It’s also why he was excited to find Hunted Labs, the brainchild of Hayden Smith. Smith previously worked on DevOps and cybersecurity for various DoD projects; during his last project for the government, Smith was working on the DoD’s bi ... Read full article.