All Posts

2 min Microsoft

Patch Tuesday - December 2014

December's advanced Patch Tuesday brings us seven advisories, three of which are listed as Critical.  Depending on how you want to count it, we see a total of 24 or 25 CVEs because one of the Internet Explorer CVEs in MS14-080 overlaps with the VBScript CVE in MS14-084. Of the critical issues, MS14-080 has the broadest scope, with 14 CVEs.  None of which are publically disclosed or known to be under active exploit.  The shared CVE with MS14-084 presents a patching and detection challenge becaus

3 min Vulnerability Disclosure

POODLE Jr.: The Revenge - How to scan for CVE-2014-8730

A severe vulnerability was disclosed in the F5 implementation of TLS 1.x that allows incorrect padding and therefore jeopardizes the protocol's ability to secure communications in a way similar to the POODLE vulnerability . The Nexpose 5.11.10 update provides coverage for this vulnerability, which has been given the identifier CVE-2014-8730 . Learn more about CVE-2

4 min IT Ops

Best Practices for Cloud Logging, Security, & Data Protection

When we first founded Logentries in 2010 a lot of people thought Viliam Holub (co-founder, CTO, and the brain behind processing billions and billions of log events in real time ) and I were crazy. The common response was: “People are not going to send their logs to the cloud… logs might contain very sensitive data…” Like typical stubborn founders we persevered in spite of this, and today we have more than 35,000 users across 100 countries

2 min

Amp Up and Defy Amplification Attacks -- Detecting Traffic Amplification Vulnerabilities with Nexpose

Approximately a year ago, the Internet saw the beginnings of what would become the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks ever seen.  Peaking at nearly 400Gbs in early 2014, these attacks started when a previously undisclosed vulnerability that would ultimately become CVE-2013-5211 was discovered.  While these attacks were devastating and they received plenty of press, the style of attack was not new.  In fact, it had

3 min Metasploit

Good-bye msfpayload and msfencode

Greetings all, On behalf of the Metasploit's development teams, I'd like to officially announce the decision of deprecating msfpayload and msfencode. Also starting today, we no longer support or accept patches for these two utilities. On June 8th 2015, the elderly msfpayload and msfencode will retire from the Metasploit repository, and replaced by their successor msfvenom. The tool msfvenom is the combination of msfpayload and msfencode, and has been in testing for more than 3.5 years. msfpayl

3 min IT Ops

Community Packs for AWS: Out of the Box Dashboards, Alerts, & Queries

We recently released Logentries Community Packs , dynamic JSON files that (when uploaded into Logentries ) automatically create Saved queries, Dashboards and Alerts. The true power of these packs is that anyone can create, modify and share them. We called them Community Packs because we want to offer different Communities a “pack” of log analysis features customized for their specifi

5 min IT Ops

Keepalived and HAProxy in AWS: An Exploratory Guide

We’re going to explore high availability and load balancing using Keepalived and HAProxy . Keepalived is a routing software designed to provide simple and robust facilities for load balancing and high-availability to Linux systems and Linux-based infrastructures. HAProxy is an open source load balancer/reverse proxy generally used for load balancing web services, but also has the functionality to load balance TCP traffic. Together, Keepali

6 min IT Ops

ES6: Javascript in Harmony: An Overview of New Language Features

ECMAScript 6 brings powerful new capabilities and some tasty syntactical sugar to the ubiquitous Javascript language, as it continues to grab an ever increasing slice of developer mindshare. Now that the ES6 feature set is frozen and just minor refinements will be made over the coming months, much of this new functionality has already landed in modern browsers, and will continue to roll out with each new browser update. For the impatient, there are also now several excellent precompile / polyf

3 min Authentication

Patch CVE-2014-6324 To Avoid A Complete Domain Rebuild When UserInsight Detects Its Exploit

On Tuesday, November 18th, Microsoft released an out-of-band security patch affecting any Windows domain controllers that are not running in Azure. I have not yet seen any cute graphics or buzzword names for it, so it will likely be known as MS14-068, CVE-2014-6324, or "that Kerberos vulnerability that is being exploited in the wild to completely take over Windows domains" because it rolls off the tongue a little better. There is a very informative description of the vulnerability, impact, and

5 min Antivirus

Finding and Protecting mission-critical assets with ControlsInsight

ControlsInsight helps organizations measure how well critical security controls are deployed and configured throughout the enterprise.   Yet, as hard you may try, it's extremely difficult to protect every asset on your network perfectly, and it's often necessary to prioritize "misson-critical" assets that store important or sensitive business data. Clearly, securing the laptop computer of Sally, the chief financial officer, is much more important than securing Joe the intern's laptop, which prob

3 min IT Ops

How to Implement JSON Formatting of IIS for Analytics and Troubleshooting

Previously, we wrote about setting up a Windows environment to log JSON formatted logs using our Windows Agent or our DataHub.  Now we’ll tackle IIS . IIS, like Windows, has a unique log format that makes it difficult to read, parse, and garner useful information.  The log is a flat file that has a line-per-web hit; similar to Apache or Nginx. But, it’s not as easy to format intoJSON as Apache and Nginix

4 min IT Ops

For the Love of Code: Why We Use JSHint for Static Code Analysis

As developers, we all strive for clean, readable, and easy to refactor code; but, unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. No matter how great a developer you are, or what language you’re coding in; problems caused by bugs inevitably spring up like weeds in the grass. These problems are exasperated by poorly organized and poorly written code. Once quality starts to drop, even the cleanest high-quality code in your project begins to be affected, until you’re left with a jumbled mess of (and ha

5 min Metasploit

R7-2014-18: Hikvision DVR Devices - Multiple Vulnerabilities

Rapid7 Labs has found multiple vulnerabilities in Hikvision DVR (Digital Video Recorder) devices such as the DS-7204 and other models in the same product series that allow a remote attacker to gain full control of the device. More specifically, three typical buffer overflow vulnerabilities were discovered in Hikvision's RTSP request handling code: CVE-2014-4878, CVE-2014-4879 and CVE-2014-4880. This blog post serves as disclosure of the technical details for th

2 min Nexpose

Why that CVSS score? HTTP TRACE vulnerability-your questions answered

Recently we saw that there were some questions on Twitter about the HTTP TRACE vulnerability check in Nexpose, specifically around the CVSS score.  Thank you @digininja , @tautology0 , and @raesene for raising this issue - we love to hear from our users and appreciate honest feedback on our solutions. Questions like these cause us to challenge our own assumptions and reasoning, which is always a healthy pr

1 min Patch Tuesday

Patch Tuesday, November 2014

Patch Tuesday came in hot this month with 15 advisories, of which 4 are listed as critical.  Hate to point it out, but this was originally advertised as 16 with 5 critical, but the patch for MS14-068 apparently isn't ready for prime time yet.  Hopefully the decision to hold it back was based on both the testing and an assessment of risk. The top patching priority is definitely going to be MS14-064, which is under active exploitation in the wild and may be related, at least superficially, to las