From a proxy plugin
to a standalone workbench.

01How it started

VirtuProbe began as a plugin for a popular web-security proxy. The problem was familiar: that proxy is excellent for a single engagement, in one window, against one target. The moment your work spans projects, with different clients, different scopes and different protocol sets, its model starts to fight you. Workspaces do not share, project switching is heavy, and anything that is not HTTP lives outside the tool entirely.

I started writing a plugin to compensate. It grew. Then I sat down, looked at what I had, and realised the frame was wrong. I was trying to bolt a different product onto someone else's foundation.

And the more I looked at it, the more familiar the gap felt. Wherever I'd worked, a greenfield core-banking platform one year and a pixel taking hundreds of millions of hits a day the next, I kept hitting the same wall: the testing tools the market handed me were never quite enough, and I'd end up coding around them, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. The proxy plugin was just the latest patch over the same hole. So on those nights at the keyboard I decided to stop patching and close the gap properly.

So I started again, this time as a standalone. The internal codename was beer-request-manager (don't ask). The plan was deliberately small: get the cross-project bits out of the way and ship a no-nonsense workbench for the protocols I actually used.

Then I kept going, mostly during sleepless nights on Hack The Box. The protocol list grew: HTTP, then SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, DNS, SMB, Kerberos, SpamAssassin scoring, and eventually Freestyle, for the ones that were never going to get a module of their own. Hand-rolled stacks against the RFCs, because every library I'd reached for "helpfully" fixed my malformed input before it ever went out. Chains, so I could stitch the protocols together. A MITM proxy, because once you have probes, the natural next step is "catch a real request and turn it into one."

What started as a plugin to patch one tool's seams turned into its own thing, VirtuProbe Studio.

02The companion plugin still exists

I haven't abandoned the original. The companion plugin lives on, scoped down to two operations that are genuinely useful when that proxy is already your home:

• Send any HTTP request from the proxy into VirtuProbe as a probe, which helps when you've shaped a request in its repeater and want to chain it across other protocols.
• Expose a small endpoint inside the proxy that VirtuProbe can post to, dropping the probe straight into its target list for further work.

If that proxy is your daily driver, VirtuProbe sits beside it as a side door into the same traffic.

03Who's behind this

VirtuProbe started as a one-person project. It isn't one anymore. A small team now builds and maintains it together, and a proper company around it is taking shape. For now it runs as an independent business.

04How to reach us

VirtuProbe is a small operation, deliberately. There is no support queue routed through three SaaS layers. It goes to my inbox.