Customer Success Engineer

Huntress targets agentic cybersecurity as revenues rise. JetBrains launches local command-line proxy to help control AI spend. 21st September 2026 With more AI in integrated development environments (IDEs) and developer tools than ever, vendor JetBrains is thinking up ways to tackle rising AI costs. Via the JetBrains blog, Viktor Kiselev and Mikhail Filippov said that, rather than limiting tool choices to shrink management overhead, JetBrains developed a local command-line proxy, JetBrains Central CLI. It routes requests from CLI coding agents. As a result, developers can run terminal agents easily, using their preferred model. And there's "virtually no administrative friction and no more waiting weeks for approvals", Kiselev and Filippov said. Therefore, managers can create and view reports in a central console. That includes current, historical and forecast AI consumption and costs for departments and shows AI costs and use by developer, agent and IDE. In addition, all the data can be aggregated with other AI expenses, using an analytics API. And you can set specific kinds of AI limits across every agent, IDE, developer, team or group, they said. Kiselev and Filippov admitted their AI development expenses were 10 times higher as of August. And that all happened in the previous six months. "When the costs started rising, we realised that we didn't know how to control them systematically," they said. Control AI costs, retain choice. The blind spot was partly because JetBrains developers also use non-JetBrains AI tools. And they choose the tools they want to use themselves, so they can select the best for each task. Most of them use between three and five AI tools in a given month, Kiselev and Filippov wrote. "They're using its IDEs as much as ever. They've added more command-line interface (CLI) agents, agentic development environments, for running several AI agents in parallel, and IDE-integrated AI tools. "Governing developers' AI usage shouldn't mean cramping their workflows," they said. JetBrains had already been collecting consumption statistics and other metrics from the server side. Then they processed them into separate, highly elastic storage. Also, they'd been applying AI credit budgets to their own tools, they said. Because more organisations were adopting generative AI, increasingly multiple models, AI costs had "skyrocketed", they said. In particular, Anthropic's release of Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.6 spiked token consumption, they said. "JetBrains developers began using these models in various places, like Claude Code CLI, the AI chat in JetBrains IDEs, and Junie. After that, usage started almost doubling every month," they said. "Soon enough, we hit 150 Claude Code seats and moved onto the Enterprise plan with rates based on API usage. That's when costs really took off." Third-party AI tools considered. JetBrains' previous management console hadn't covered third-party AI tools. Meanwhile the mix of tools kept changing, they said. As a result, JetBrains Central CLI was built, essentially after repurposing a personal debugging tool. "The CLI currently supports three of the most popular terminal agents. Four more are in internal beta," they noted. However, niche setups and personal AI subscriptions will remain out of scope. "As our goal is to cover the AI traffic running through the tools developers most rely on," they added. Security 9th September 2026

Why Rider and ReSharper were slow to Start, and how Microsoft helped fix the problem. September 9, 2026 When JetBrains launched ReSharper's out-of-process (OOP) architecture, users reported slower startup times for IDEs using ReSharper on Windows. After profiling, the cause surprised JetBrains: Microsoft Defender was scanning its process for longer than JetBrains expected. This post is about what JetBrains found, what JetBrains learned working with Microsoft, and a tool JetBrains built that allows others to run the same investigation. An unexpected factor in startup performance. Performance of its tools has consistently been the number one subject of feedback JetBrains has received from its users over the years. Its telemetry and user surveys confirmed what many of you have been telling JetBrains: Despite ReSharper's powerful features, the impact on Visual Studio's responsiveness was affecting your daily workflow. This led JetBrains down the path of developing its new out-of-process (OOP) architecture. JetBrains originally launched OOP mode for the public last year. (Now, thanks to these investigations, as of 2026.2.1 it is enabled by default.) In general, its telemetry indicated improved performance. However, at some point, JetBrains noticed something unexpected - customers started reporting slower startup times. After a few profiling iterations, the collected data pointed to an unexpected source of latency: Microsoft Defender. It turned out that processes in write-protected paths receive wider trust rules. Microsoft Defender barely touches those processes during startup - scanning takes a couple of seconds, even when ReSharper loads their DLLs from the user installation directory. But the moment ReSharper started running as a separate process, Defender scanned it in full, adding tens of seconds to first launch (see the chart below). This triggered its curiosity and sent JetBrains down a rabbit hole. JetBrains started analyzing Microsoft Defender ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) logs across dozens of developer tools, and the findings were striking: Some tools get scanned for 30+ seconds at startup while others finish in under a second, as JetBrains had observed above. JetBrains obviously wanted to learn the reasons behind that and find ways to speed up startup for JetBrains tools. An ambitious project, but JetBrains were up for the challenge! The first thing JetBrains needed was to set up a repeatable measurement process. That way JetBrains could share it with other teams in JetBrains, and with its colleagues from Microsoft to have a productive conversation. JetBrains is grateful for all Microsoft's explanations, openness, and willingness to help JetBrains with this investigation. Measuring the impact. JetBrains tracked the activity of Microsoft Defender in two ways: Microsoft Defender ETW logs (as mentioned above) and direct CPU time measurements. JetBrains found the two methods to be roughly equivalent for its scenario. If you're interested in the distinction, see its GitHub readme for more info. Microsoft Defender, like many other Windows components, uses ETW. It emits events under the Microsoft-Antimalware-Engine provider. Microsoft provides a PowerShell module for Defender-related performance investigations that uses this provider. It has two cmdlets: New-MpPerformanceRecording to collect a trace, and Get-MpPerformanceReport to analyze it. In its scenarios, most slowdowns came from Microsoft Defender's scan events. The Microsoft-Antimalware-Engine/StreamScanRequestTask ETW events report each scan's Start and End time, representing how long Defender spent scanning that stream in real-world elapsed time. The data JetBrains gathered showed JetBrains clearly how Defender was impacting its tool's startup wall time. Methodology. Performance measurements were run on a Dell Pro Max 16 (MA16250) laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H (16 cores) processor and 64 GB of DDR5-class memory. The host ran Windows 11 Pro. The workload was executed inside a Hyper-V VM configured with 8 vCPUs and 8 GB of static RAM. Each tool was measured 10 times. As per standard best practices when measuring performance, JetBrains rebooted its VM before each measurement to simulate a cold start. This reduced observed file and memory caching effects on its results. The charts below show the mean scan time with standard deviation error bars. Results of the experiment. As you can see, JetBrains measured a variety of development tools, and there were clear differences in the amount of time Defender took to scan them: * JetBrains IDEs (JetBrains IDEs, and some other editor-class tools) took roughly 10-40 seconds to scan at cold start, while Microsoft IDEs and various other editors had negligible scan times in comparison (all under 1 second). * CLI-based tools (the command-line agents) took under ~2 seconds to scan, likely because they're small, simple binaries with few DLLs. Collaboration with Microsoft and its solution. Even though JetBrains had built a tool to measure Microsoft Defender's impact, JetBrains still failed to fully understand Defender's scanning principles. JetBrains also consulted their documentation to no avail. So JetBrains reached out to its colleagues at Microsoft directly! They helped JetBrains understand the parameters which cause Microsoft Defender to perform more work. A core principle was that files in write-protected folders would be optimized for scanning. At this point, JetBrains reviewed all the ways JetBrains install and start its tools to find a way to reduce the scanning times. One observation was that JetBrains Rider is subject to even more intensive scanning than IntelliJ IDEA and ReSharper combined. The reason for this was also not clear to JetBrains, so JetBrains asked the Microsoft team for help again. They were able to make optimizations on their end for this specific case and adjustments to Defender released in version 1.449.454.0. Now ReSharper OOP and JetBrains Rider get the scanning performance boost when installed into a write-protected directory: JetBrains Toolbox installs software in the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs directory. Since this directory does not require elevation for writing, Toolbox can update the software seamlessly, but as you can see in the chart above, it does not receive the write-protected performance boost. As JetBrains has reported previously, Rider itself excludes some directories from Microsoft Defender during the installation process (more about this here). It uses the Add-MpPreference PowerShell cmdlet to help you automatically configure a Microsoft Defender exclusion. JetBrains is still evaluating the best way to support the JetBrains Toolbox installation of Rider and Microsoft Defender exclusions. You can follow its progress in its TBX-2851 issue. Note: The ability to add exclusions locally can be disabled/blocked by administrators in managed environments. Measuring for your own tool. If you're experiencing the slow startup of your own tool, it definitely makes sense to analyze whether Microsoft Defender is affecting it. To help with your investigation, JetBrains is releasing the tool JetBrains built for its own - the small and easy-to-use Defender Performance Tool. The source code and release builds are on GitHub. A few things you can do with it: * Watch your application's scan activity in real time as it starts, loads plugins, or compiles something. * Open snapshots recorded offline with New-MpPerformanceRecording, so you can investigate traces from another machine (for example, one collected by a customer). * Export a CSV file when multiple snapshots are loaded, for further analysis. JetBrains hope that helps you with similar investigations. Let JetBrains know of any interesting findings! Conclusion. As you can see, Microsoft Defender can have a large impact on tooling performance. JetBrains learned a lot working with Microsoft in this area, and JetBrains hope its findings help developers and vendors understand how best to maintain the security of their Windows systems by observing and tuning Microsoft Defender's behavior. Summary of best practices for working with Microsoft Defender: * Keep your Microsoft Defender definitions up-to-date. * Use the Microsoft PowerShell module for Defender-related performance investigations. * Try its new tool to help analyze Microsoft Defender logs, available on GitHub. * Optimize Microsoft Defender scanning by installing software to write-protected directories. * Use the Add-MpPreference PowerShell cmdlet to help you automatically configure a Microsoft Defender exclusion, if required. * Set up a DevDrive on your Windows machine for storing your repositories and package caches. Hopefully, you've noticed these improvements to ReSharper and Rider in your workflow too! ReSharper 2026.2.1 now ships with OOP enabled by default. Try it out today!

JetBrains Cadence breach exposes AWS credentials via TeamCity exploit. Attackers breached JetBrains' Cadence infrastructure by exploiting an unpatched TeamCity vulnerability. The company urges all users to rotate credentials immediately. * Threat actors exploited a critical TeamCity flaw to access JetBrains' internal systems. * The breach targeted Cadence, exposing AWS credentials and execution secrets. * JetBrains advises immediate credential revocation and rotation for all Cadence users. * Unpatched instances of TeamCity were the initial attack vector. * Organizations using Cadence must audit and secure their cloud configurations. JetBrains has confirmed a security breach affecting its Cadence workflow platform, stemming from attackers exploiting a known critical vulnerability in its TeamCity build system. The incident resulted in unauthorized access to internal systems and the exposure of sensitive AWS credentials. In response, JetBrains is advising all Cadence users to immediately revoke and rotate any credentials or secrets that may have been used in Cadence executions. This action is essential to mitigate potential abuse of exposed cloud resources and maintain secure operations. Vulnerability Exploitation. * Attackers leveraged a recently disclosed critical vulnerability in TeamCity to gain initial access. * The unpatched nature of the affected TeamCity instance enabled deeper infiltration into JetBrains' environment. * Exploitation led directly to the compromise of Cadence-related infrastructure and associated AWS credentials. Impact and response. * Sensitive execution secrets and cloud credentials were accessed during the breach. * JetBrains issued an urgent advisory recommending full credential rotation for Cadence users. * Organizations are advised to audit their AWS environments for signs of unauthorized activity. Sources.