About Us
ONYPHE was founded in France in 2017 with a straightforward mission: give defenders the same view of the Internet that attackers have. Ransomware gangs and other threat actors scan the Internet constantly, looking for exposed vulnerabilities and misconfigured services. We built ONYPHE so that organisations could see what they see, and close the door before anyone walks through it.
Eight years later, that mission hasn't changed. We scan the entire Internet every week, tracking exposed assets, vulnerable services, and adversary infrastructure across billions of IP addresses, domains, and URLs. Our data powers ASM, CTI, and Attack Surface Discovery workflows for governments, critical infrastructure operators, financial institutions, and security teams who need to understand their exposure and act on it.
There lies our purpose of fighting ransomware exposure.
Built on trust, not hype
ONYPHE is fully bootstrapped and customer-funded. We've grown by doing good work and keeping our customers' trust, not by chasing investment rounds or overpromising on roadmaps. That means we're accountable to the people who use our data, not to outside investors, and we intend to keep it that way.
About Ethical Internet Scanning
Internet scanning at scale raises real questions about responsibility. Our founder and CEO Patrice Auffret has been thinking about those questions since the beginning. In 2022 he presented ONYPHE's 10 Commandments for Ethical Internet Scanning at the Cyber and Threat Intelligence Summit, part of hack.lu. The principles are simple: be transparent about who you are and what you're doing, scan responsibly, and honour opt-out requests immediately and without question. No exceptions.
On 19 October 2022, our Founder and CEO Patrice Auffret gave the opening keynote at the Cyber and Threat Intelligence Summit (CTIS 2022), part of hack.lu, presenting the 10 Commandments for Ethical Internet Scanning to roughly 200 people from the defensive security and threat intelligence fields. The full recording is available on YouTube.
Our goal is to open the discussion with researchers and organisations worldwide on what ethical Internet scanning looks like in practice, making it better understood and better received by network owners, and recognised as a legitimate part of the defensive arsenal.
A team you can rely on
We're not trying to be the fastest-growing company in cybersecurity. We're trying to be the most reliable one. If you're looking for a long-term partner with deep data, a clear ethical framework, and skin in the game, we'd like to hear from you.
Our 10 Commandments for Ethical Internet Scanning
- 1.Web server explaining purpose on every probe
- 2.Give an opt-out request e-mail address
- 3.Set whois records with organization & abuse@ email address
- 4.Give probes IP address list on probes Web servers
- 5.Reverse DNS pointing to your project/company
- 6.Handle abuse requests on a timely manner, ask no question
- 7.Reverse DNS pointing to your project/company
- 8.Scan slowly to not stress target (or source) networks
- 9.Use fixed IP addresses, not trashable ones
- 10.Honor remove collected data requests on a timely manner, ask no question