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2 min Patch Tuesday

Patch Tuesday - February 2018

It's a run-of-the-mill month as far as Patch Tuesdays go. Even so, 50 individual CVEs have been fixed by Microsoft, most of which (34) are rated "Important". As usual, most of the 14 considered "Critical" are web browser vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution (RCE). The most concerning non-browser issue is CVE-2018-0825 , an RCE i

4 min

Coinhive: Making Other People’s Web Browsers Mine Cryptocurrency

Over the weekend, we had a discussion at tCell about cryptocurrency, because there was a rash of stories about cryptocurrency mining being done through malicious JavaScript. (Scott Helme of securityheaders.io noted that the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data privacy regulator, was among the many web sites affected .) According

4 min Endpoint Security

Why Managed Detection and Response Zeroes In On the Endpoint

This post was co-written with Wade Woolwine , Rapid7 Director of Managed Services. What three categories do attackers exploit to get on your corporate network? Vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and credentials. Whether the attack starts by stealing cloud service credentials, or exploiting a vulnerability on a misconfigured, internet-facing asset, compromising an internal asset is a great milestone for an intruder. Once an endpoint is comprom

3 min Compliance

HIPAA Security Compliance Fallacies (And How To Avoid Them)

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance hasn’t been what I thought it was going to be. When I first started out as an independent security consultant, I was giddy over the business opportunities that I just knew HIPAA compliance was going to bring. Around that time, I learned something from sales expert, Jeffrey Gitomer, that has had a profound impact on my career. He said that if you work for yourself and are in sales, which I am, that you must write and speak if

2 min Metasploit Weekly Wrapup

Metasploit Wrapup 2/9/18

Teenage ROBOT Returns Imagine the joy robot parents must feel when their infant leaves home and returns as a teenager. ROBOT (Return of Bleichenbacher Oracle Threat) is a 19-year-old vulnerability that allows RSA decryption and signing with the private key of a TLS server. It allows for an adaptive-chosen ciphertext attack. It is still very much relevant today as some modern HTTPS hosts are vulnerable to ROBOT

3 min Metasploit Weekly Wrapup

Metasploit Wrapup: Feb. 2, 2018

It’s a special day here in the U.S.. This morning, media folks were hovering over a specific rodent living in an eastern state to discover that we are in for six more weeks of winter , apparently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Guess we’ll stay inside and work on Metasploit… EternalSunshine of the Security Minded If you’re still

2 min Metasploit Weekly Wrapup

Metasploit Wrapup: Jan. 26, 2018

In last week’s wrap-up post , we raised awareness of the new Metasploit 5 work we’re ramping up on. This week, please GoAhead and enjoy some new Metasploit goodies! Get Up, GoAhead Based on research from danielhodson , hdm and h00die put together a new module

4 min

XSS Bug Reports Made Easy

When attackers compromise a website with XSS , it is important to understand what actually happened leading up to the exploit, as well as information on how the exploit was performed, and have clear information on how to remediate. The importance of this was recently illustrated to me in working with one of our customers on an alert triggered by an XSS exploit on the customer’s web application. This blog is an accoun

2 min InsightVM

Vulnerability Management Year in Review, Part 3: Remediate

The wide impact of the Petya-like ransomware in 2017, mere weeks after WannaCry exploited many of the same vulnerabilities, illustrated the challenge that enterprises have with remediating even major headline-grabbing vulnerabilities, let alone the many vulnerabil

3 min InsightIDR

How To Detect Unauthorized DNS Servers On Your Network

DNS was never designed as a very secure protocol, and it is a popular target for attackers. Here is how you can detect unauthorized DNS servers on your network

1 min Metasploit Weekly Wrapup

Metasploit Wrapup 1/19/18

Metasploit 5 Development Has Begun It's 2018, the ice is melting in Austin, and as we hinted last October , Metasploit 5 development efforts have begun in earnest. We have a laundry list of features that we are working on for it. The first feature merged in Metasploit 5 replaces the module cache, which decreases the memory used

2 min

Think Like a Hacker: Going Beyond Network Security

From health care companies to credit agencies and telecommunication firms, hackers didn’t hold back in 2017. With no simple solution to hacking on the horizon, it’s a safe bet that 2018 will come with its own share of data breaches, compromises and concerns. Short of pulling the plug and living in the dark, how can companies protect their data and beat hackers at their own game? It’s all in your head. Key Characteristics To Thinking Like A Hacker Here’s the bottom line: IT security fai

4 min InsightVM

A RESTful API for InsightVM

With 2017 firmly in the rear-view mirror, we peer forward into 2018 and thanks to genre-bending vulnerabilities like Meltdown and Spectre the future would seem a bit blurry. Louis Pasteur is attributed with the quote: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Pasteur’s work precedes information security as we know it today by a century, but as an an individu

3 min InsightAppSec

3 Questions to Ask When Prioritizing Web Application Vulnerabilities

Dynamic application security testing (DAST) often results in a constantly evolving list of security vulnerabilities. When scanning a web application in production or in an active testing environment, issues can crop up as quickly as changes happen within the app. And when exposed to the internet itself, there are many more ways in which security vulnerabilities

6 min Log Management

Taking a Message-Based Approach to Logging

When you think about it, a log entry is really nothing more than a message that describes an event. As such, taking a message-based approach to logging by utilizing messaging technologies makes sense. Messaging creates the loose coupling that allows a logging system to be adaptable to the needs at hand and extensible over time. Understanding a Standard Logging Architecture Typically, logging is implemented in an application using a logger