I'd like to be exited about this, but this uncertainty combined with the fact that their security personnel is a team of dogs[1] makes it quite hard for me.
EDIT: If there were humans on that team in addition to the dogs, I'd not be nearly so upset.
Still, the optics aren't good.
Most team pages I've seen don't specifically identify people working on infosec aspects of the product. That could be an attack vector if you're really being paranoid.
No seriously I bet you this is just a blunt humor attempt. Someone thought it was cute. Those who prefer to remain hidden from camera just don't want to be seen on the Internet. I probably should go on LinkedIn and look for someone with security title working for this conpany, I might be right.
Nation states are like any organization. They are resource and time constrained. If you set the bar high you will eliminate the low hanging fruit adversaries. Force them to put the work in... Plus if you show them you are very careful and watching everything you will force them to be extra careful, as not to tip off any surveillance, which expends more resources.
Whether or not they can actually be anonymous is not the ultimate goal. That would require a lot of work and attention to detail. But you can still do some basic stuff to make the lives of hackers hard.
If what you suggested is the right practice, then why is Google Zero Project members a public thing? A lot of them are publicly known. If infosec people are vulnerable, isn't your building security guard vulnerable? We got tens of thousands of hackers attending DefCon, Blackhats, and other security events every years and shouldn't we be worried? We got some of the most respected hackers and security engineers on planets attending them. How do you think government (FBI) recruited an anonymous hacker to work for them? Aren't your network engineers not vulnerable? Let's not kid ourselves with this ridiculous and quite frankly stupid obfuscation. If people are easy to fall for social engineering, let's find a solution that address the problem. Your impression of hidhing behind the curtain is basically the sterotype of hackers in basement. History has taught us the only famous computer programmer yet to be revealed is the creator(s) of Bitcoin. We don't knod if any nation states know who created Bitcoin. Otherwise, the government has pretty good hand in finding people. Resource constraint is a joke. If government wants to hack into Verizon they would have the resource assigned.
Sorry to be harsh but this is again false sense of security. Most startups would have developers have access to production so developers are just as vulnerable as infosec folks. Then why reveal the rest of the team? That counters your argument malicious actors would have a harder time to social engineer. So let's really not pretend we are doing better without revealing infosec because that's just nonsense in practice unless you are working on a project that may have serious retialation such as defeating Wanna worm then I understand masking your identity.
If it requires a person to spend time researching non-open source intelligence avenues then I disagree.
The point is by not doing something a company can gain something. That's not a big ask for the marketing team not to mention names in any public interface.
It's easy to assume that 'nation state' surveillance means that a sophisticated person will hunt down a piece of information. But that's actually quite a resource intensive request.
Quickly finding someones name on publicly available resources and adding it to a list is on quite a different level than having a hacker/trained person hunt down a hidden piece of information that must be triangulated from other disparate pieces of information. And I say this having spent quite a bit of time doxxing people for fun myself - it's a time intensive activity regardless if it was ultimately easy to do. The less information available the much hard it is to do.
Also, you probably are familiar, sites like LinkedIn can be a great source for getting list of employees, and guessing company email is usually takes some effort once the attacker figures out the naming convention of email addresses.
Anyway, partial information is just as bad as full disclosure when the unhidden secrets are just as useful as the hidden one. So we either hide everything or we don't hide anything.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ghcq-targets-engin...
Employees with dogs: "Aww! It'll be so cute to add our dogs! Let's give them fun titles!"
Most people: "So cute! Look honey, they have a picture of a dog named 'Cosmo' that's their 'Head of Security'! Haha!"
Hacker News: "This is an affront to the serious nature of computer security and an insult! I am shocked that a startup would make such an attempt at 'humor' when the OS they use does not have 100% perfect security and our privacy and digital security is being threatened daily by the men in black. I will never buy this product!!!!!11"
HN: What's the big deal?
Most people: It's a little creepy that everyone knows everything about me, and the identity theft epidemic kinda sucks. Not much I can do other than keep an eye on the accounts, chase down fraud as it happens, self-censor, and pray I don't get hit with ransomeware. I have other battles to fight, so I hope the tech industry has my 6 on this one.
and it seems to be buggy with no webgl? using chromium under linux I get "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'getExtension' of null"
It still works on Chrome but you never know what the next firmware upgrade brings...