VirtuProbe Studio
VirtuProbe Studio
About
A short story of how VirtuProbe Studio came to be — and who's behind the binary you're being asked to install.
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 — different clients, different scopes, different protocol sets — its model starts to fight you. Workspaces don't share. Project switching is heavy. Anything that isn't 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, 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, SpamAssassin scoring. Hand-rolled stacks against the RFCs, because every library I'd reached for "helpfully" fixed my malformed input before it hit the wire. 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.
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:
If that proxy is your daily driver, VirtuProbe is a side door, not a replacement.
Founder · Builder · Maintainer
Jakub Stonavský
Based in Prague. 20+ years in the trade — telco and embedded systems, then PPF's greenfield core-banking system with a team of brilliant engineers, then a big-data venture started with two Canadian friends. VirtuProbe is what came next.
Outside the keyboard: father, husband. Aikido, jiu-jitsu, and kyusho. Golf and the range. Eight-plus languages, with varying fluency. A guitar that gets played more weeks than it doesn't.
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 Czech sole-trader business.
VirtuProbe is a small operation, deliberately. There is no support queue routed through three SaaS layers — it goes to my inbox.
If you find a bug or a security issue, write to security@ — I'd rather hear it from you than read about it elsewhere.
Current builds are distributed unsigned, with SHA-256 checksums published alongside the downloads. Signed builds are coming in a near iteration. If you're cautious about installing unsigned software from a small vendor — and you should be — verify the SHA-256 before opening, and write to security@ if anything looks off.
Installation is local. The application stores your work on your own disk. The only servers the application contacts on its own are the license validator and the update channel; everything else only happens when you point a probe at it.