Posts by Rapid7

2 min Patch Tuesday

September Patch Tuesday Roundup

Microsoft's patch for September includes 4 Critical Bulletins and 5 Important Bulletins covering 11 vulnerabilities. A couple vulnerabilities are worth noting including: MS10-064 a vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook allows for Remote Code Execution. This is the classic drive-by malware in which the attacker sends a malicious email message to the victim.  Simply by opening the contents of an email, the attacker can gain full control of the victim's machine.  Organizations should conduct user aw

3 min

Impersonating the Windows Print Spooler for Relayed RPC

On Friday night, I committed our exploit module which takes advantage of the vulnerability [http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2010-2729] fixed in MS10-061 [http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-061.mspx]. If you haven't seen it yet, you can find it here [http://www.metasploit.com/modules/exploit/windows/smb/ms10_061_spoolss]. In its most egregious form, this bug allowed a guest user with print access to write arbitrary content to arbitrary files with SYSTEM p

2 min Patch Tuesday

August Patch Tuesday Roundup

Microsoft's patch this month, which consists of 14 bulletins that address 34 vulnerabilities, is the largest since October 2009.   With the massive amount of work that lies ahead, it may help to prioritize your work. Josh Abraham, Rapid7 Security Researcher, recommends that you pay particular attention to MS10-054. This vulnerability in the SMB protocol “is potentially the most dangerous vulnerability as it allows unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary codes on remote machines.”  Abrah

2 min

Black Hat Race To Root Results

We had a good number of folks compete for prizes in the Race to Root competition at this year's Black Hat, so thanks to everyone who came by. Three competitors came out on top. Anders Hansen took first place! He'll be receiving both a ProxMark3 (http://proxmark3.com/) and a MAKInterface Magstripe Reader/Writer, Haikon Krohn took second place and will pick up a ProxMark3, and our third place finalist (JT Taylor) will also be receiving a MAKInterface. I was surprised by the number of folks who h

5 min

Shiny Old VxWorks Vulnerabilities

Back in June, I decided to spend some time looking at the VxWorks [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/VxWorks] operating system. Specifically, I kept finding references to VxWorks-based devices running firmware images with the debug service (WDB Agent) enabled, but I could not find a description of the protocol or any estimates as to how prevalent this service was. After a couple days of digging around and a couple more days of scanning, I became aware of just how extensive this issu

2 min

W3AF: An Open Source Success Story

Today, as Rapid7 announced the sponsorship [http://www.rapid7.com/news-events/press-releases/2010/2010-w3af.jsp] of a second open source project with its support of w3af [http://w3af.sourceforge.net/], I reflect back on my experience with Rapid7 over the last 9 months. When I agreed to the acquisition of the Metasploit project by Rapid7 in October last year it was with a lot of excitement but also with a small leap of faith. In my initial blog post [/2009/10/21/metasploit-rising] from October 2

3 min

July Patch Tuesday Roundup

The highlight of Microsoft's security bulletins is the fix for Microsoft's online help vulnerability (MS10-042) identified by Google security researcher, Tavis Ormandy, which could allow an attacker to take control of a computer by luring a computer user to a malicious Web site. Also as Microsoft's July security bulletins also address vulnerabilities in Windows XP, Josh Abraham, Rapid7 Security Researcher recommends that “customers should keep in-mind that Windows XP SP2 is now end-of-life. Th

1 min Metasploit

Metasploit Framework 3.4.1 Released!

The Metasploit Project is proud to announce the release of the Metasploit Framework version 3.4.1.  As always, you can get it from our downloads page [http://www.metasploit.com/framework/download/], for Windows or Linux.  This release sees the first official non-Windows Meterpreter payload, in PHP as discussed last month [/2010/06/14/meterpreter-for-pwned-home-pages].  Rest assured that more is in store for Meterpreter on other platforms.  A new extension called Railgun [http://mail.metasploit.c

2 min

Introducing Metasploitable

One of the questions that we often hear is "What systems can i use to test against?" Based on this, we thought it would be a good idea throw together an exploitable VM that you can use for testing purposes. Metasploitable is an Ubuntu 8.04 server install on a VMWare 6.5 image. A number of vulnerable packages are included, including an install of tomcat 5.5 (with weak credentials), distcc, tikiwiki, twiki, and an older mysql. You can use most VMware products [http://www.vmware.com/products/play

2 min

Metasploit Framework 3.4.0 Released!

After five months of development, version 3.4.0 of the Metasploit Framework [http://www.metasploit.com/framework/download/] has been released. Since the last major release (3.3) over 100 new exploits have been added and over 200 bugs have been fixed. This release includes massive improvements to the Meterpreter payload; both in terms of stability and features, thanks in large part to Stephen Fewer of Harmony Security.  The Meterpreter payload can now capture screenshots without migrating, inc

2 min

May Patch Tuesday Roundup

Time for the May 2010 summary of the upcoming Microsoft Security Updates…. 2 Advisories, with 2 Vulnerabilities covered. Both are rated as Critical. The first one covering Outlook Express, Microsoft Mail, and Microsoft Live Mail on all Windows Operating Systems (sans Server Core and Server Core for Windows Server 2008 R2) and the second covering Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications. Both Vulnerabilities allow for Remote Code Execution. Heres a breakdown: MS10-030 – Mail Server Integ

3 min Metasploit

Approaching Metasploit 3.4.0 and Metasploit Express

Since mid-December, the Metasploit team has been working non-stop towards version 3.4.0 of the Metasploit Framework. The final release is still scheduled for mid-May, but I wanted to share some of the upcoming features, available today from the development tree. Version 3.4.0 includes major improvements to the Meterpreter payload, the expansion of the framework's brute force capabilities, and the complete overhaul of the backend database schema and event subsystem. In addition, more than 60 exp

3 min

April Microsoft Patch Tuesday Roundup

Time for this month's summary of the latest Microsoft Security updates … 11 advisories, with 25 vulnerabilities covered. 5 Critical; 5 Important; 1 Moderate.  This is the heaviest April update we've seen; we generally see 5-8 updates in April and 25 vulnerabilities breaks the 2009 April record of 21. The SMB DoS issue is being addressed, rated Important and affecting Windows & Exchange.  2 issues affecting Office, both of which are rated Important.  The other 8 affect Windows with 5 Crit

3 min

Persistent Meterpreter over Reverse HTTPS

Botnet agents and malware go through inordinate lengths to hide their command and control traffic. From a penetration testing perspective, emulating these types of communication channels is possible, but often requires a custom toolkit to be deployed to the target. In this post I will walk through using the standard Metasploit Meterpreter payload as a persistent encrypted remote control tool. First things first, grab the latest version [http://www.metasploit.com/framework/download/] of Metasplo

2 min

March Microsoft Out-Of-Band Patch Tuesday Roundup

Brief summary of today's Out-Of-Band Microsoft Security update … 1 Cumulative IE update, with 10 vulnerabilities covered. While Out-Of-Band updates are not unheard of (this is the second one so far this year), 10 vulnerabilities covered is a lot. Here's the breakdown: MS10-018: Rated Critical.  Cumulative update for Internet Explorer, covering 10 vulnerabilities: CVE-2010-0267 (Uninitialized Memory Corruption) CVE-2010-0488 (Post Encoding Information Disclosure) CVE-2010-0489 (Race C