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6 min IT Ops

Do You Still Email Yourself from Your Code? How to Stop the Madness

A few years back now, I took on an assignment to help a company modernize a series of legacy .NET applications.  One of these did some back office processing.  A vendor would stick some files on a shared drive, and a windows scheduled task would invoke this bit of code to parse the file, apply a whole slew of business rules to its contents, and then update the appropriate internal systems.  The details are both proprietary and uninteresting, so I will spare you those. The author of this appli

2 min InsightIDR

What's the Difference Between InsightIDR & InsightUBA?

We're now a few weeks into our InsightIDR launch, and the response has been tremendous – thank you! The Insight Platform is purpose-built to help you detect and investigate attacks earlier across your entire network ecosystem. InsightIDR builds upon the tested User Behavior Analytics and full functionality in InsightUBA (formerly UserInsight), and adds powerful log search, investigation, and compliance dashboards for an end-to-end Incident Detection and Response offering. Everything in InsightU

13 min IT Ops

The 4 Steps for Creating a Log Enabled Marketing Campaign

Typically, most logging activity in the online world is concerned with collecting information about an enterprise’s digital infrastructure. Machine logs, application logs, network logs, database logs, access logs are a few examples of such activity. However, as marketing campaigns become more integrated into application activity, using log data to monitor and to measure the effectiveness of a campaign is a viable extension of an enterprise’s current logging activity. But, we need to beware.

4 min Vulnerability Disclosure

R7-2016-02: Multiple Vulnerabilities in ManageEngine OpUtils

Disclosure Summary ManageEngine OpUtils is an enterprise switch port and IP address management system. Rapid7's Deral Heiland discovered a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability, as well as a number of insecure direct object references. The vendor and CERT have been notified of these issues. The version tested was OpUtils 8.0, which was the most recent version at the time of initial disclosure. As of today, the current version offered by ManageEngine is OpUtils 12.0. R7-2016-02.1:

5 min IoT

R7-2016-01: Null Credential on Moxa NPort (CVE-2016-1529)

This advisory was written by the discoverer of the NPort issue, Joakim Kennedy of Rapid7, Inc. Securing legacy hardware is a difficult task, especially when the hardware is being connected in a way that was never initially intended. One way of making legacy hardware more connectable is to use serial servers. The serial server acts as a bridge and allows serial devices to communicate over TCP/IP. The device then appears on the network as a normal network-connected device. This allows for remote

3 min Nexpose

How to use Nexpose to find all assets affected by DROWN

Introduction DROWN is a cross-protocol attack against OpenSSL. The attack uses export cipher suites and SSLv2 to decrypt TLS sessions. SSLv2 was developed by Netscape and released in February 1995. Due to it containing a number of security flaws, the protocol was completely redesigned and SSLv3 was released in 1996. Even though SSLv2 was declared obsolete over 20 years ago, there are still servers supporting the protocol. What's both fascinating and devastating about the DROWN attack, is that se

4 min Public Policy

Rapid7, Bugcrowd, and HackerOne file pro-researcher comments on DMCA Sec. 1201

On Mar. 3rd, Rapid7, Bugcrowd , and HackerOne submitted joint comments to the Copyright Office urging them to provide additional protections for security researchers. The Copyright Office requested public input as part of a study on Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Our comments to the Copyright Office focused on reforming

5 min IT Ops

Brics Vs RE2/J

By Benoit Gaudin and Mark Lacomber Regular Expressions When it comes to searching unstructured data, regular expressions are a very useful and powerful tool. The power provided by popular regular expression libraries does come with a significant performance cost in some cases though, both when compiling regular expressions into automata (state explosion problem when determinising automata) and when using these automata to match input. These constraints are usually acceptable for individuals ne

3 min Release Notes

Weekly Metasploit Wrapup: March 14, 2016

Scanning for the Fortinet backdoor with Metasploit Written by wvu Metasploit now implements a scanner for the Fortinet backdoor. Curious to see how to use it? Check this out! wvu@kharak:~/metasploit-framework:master$ ./msfconsole -qL msf > use auxiliary/scanner/ssh/fortinet_backdoor msf auxiliary(fortinet_backdoor) > set rhosts 417.216.55.0/24 rhosts => 417.216.55.0/24 msf auxiliary(fortinet_backdoor) > set threads 100 threads => 100 msf auxiliary(fortinet_backdoor) > run

5 min IT Ops

A point of @Contention- cache coherence on the JVM

Java 8’s major changes- lexical closures, the stream API, e.t.c have overshadowed a slew of little gems, one of which I only discovered the other day- the @Contended annotation. False Sharing Chances are you’re reading this on a device with more than one CPU. There’s therefore also quite a good chance the you have more than one thread of execution running at the exact same time. There’s an equally good chance that some of your fancy multiprocessor CPU’s on-die memory (aka L2/3 cache) is share

3 min

Atomic Design @ Rapid7

Device-Level Design Should Not Be A Thing Large monitors, small monitors, laptops, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, toasters, refrigerators…where will it end? Nowadays, application designers need to consider a plethora of devices as they design. While we are not considering designing Nexpose and InsightIDR for your toaster, maybe one day we will! Although, Brad Frost tells the world of design that device-level design is an outdated concept. That's news to our ears! Let's look at this more c

3 min Threat Intel

Threat Intelligence Foundations: Crawl, Walk, Analyze - Part 3

This is the third post in a three-part series on threat intelligence foundations, discussing the fundamentals of how threat intelligence can be used in security operations. Here's Part 1 and Part 2 . Intelligence Analysis in Security Operations In the first two parts of this series we talked about frameworks for understanding and approaching intelligenc

5 min Threat Intel

Threat Intelligence Foundations: Crawl, Walk, Analyze - Part 2

This is the second post in a three-part series on threat intelligence foundations, discussing the fundamentals of how threat intelligence can be used in security operations. Read Part One here . Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Utilizing Multiple Types of Intelligence Just as there are different operational levels of intelligence—discussed in detail in the first post

4 min IT Ops

Deciphering MySQL Logs: The What, Why, and How

Logs are one of the best ways to understand what a server is doing. Thankfully, MySQL has no shortage of log activity to assist a DBA in its maintenance. It writes out its activity to 5 different logs.  This post will take a look at the existing MySQL logs and how they assist the administrator. * On Windows, - The log is written to the data directory with a .err extension even if not explicitly enabled. * Errors are automatically written to the Event Log. This behavior is standard and

4 min Threat Intel

Threat Intelligence Foundations: Crawl, Walk, Analyze - Part 1

This is the first post in a three-part series on threat intelligence foundations, discussing the fundamentals of how threat intelligence can be used in security operations. There is a consensus among many in threat intelligence that the way the community has approached threat intelligence in the past -  i.e, the “Threat Data → SIEM → Magical Security Rainbows” approach has left something to be desired, and that something is usu