All Posts

2 min Authentication

Protect Your Service Accounts: Detecting Service Accounts Authenticating from a New Host

IT professionals set up service accounts to enable automated processes, such as backup services and network scans. In UserInsight, we can give you quick visibility into service accounts by detecting which accounts do not have password expiration enabled. Many UserInsight subscribers love this simple feature, which is available the instant they have integrated their LDAP directory with UserInsight. In addition, UserInsight has several new ways to detect compromised service accounts. To do their

3 min IT Ops

Heroku Buttons Rock!

As one of Heroku’s beta users I had the chance to check out the new Heroku button gallery last week. I must say I was very pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, it’s fair to say Heroku have nailed their PAAS offering. They are one of the few PAAS providers to truly succeed in providing developers both an easy to deploy platform, and a full ecosystem of add ons. This allows you as a developer to get on with what you do best. Yes, you can actually spend you

2 min SIEM

Get HP ArcSight Alerts on Compromised Credentials, Phishing Attacks and Suspicious Behavior

If you're using HP ArcSight ESM as your SIEM, you can now add user-based incident detection and response to your bag of tricks. Rapid7 is releasing a new integration between Rapid7 UserInsight and HP ArcSight ESM , which enables you to detect, investigate and respond to security threats targeting a company's users more quickly and effectively. HP ArcSight is

3 min IT Ops

Logging from PHP Web Frameworks like Laravel

So what is Laravel ? Laravel is a relatively new MVC web framework for PHP that was released in 2012. It’s also the most popular PHP project on Github at the time of this post. Like many web frameworks, Laravel boasts an easy learning-curve to get an app up and running. This was certainly the case when I used it. While this post is focusing on logging in Laravel, its applicable to other php web frameworks, like Symfony2

2 min Vulnerability Disclosure

UserInsight Gets the All-Clear for ShellShock and Helps Detect Attackers on Your Network

If you're in security, you've likely already heard about the ShellShock vulnerability (aka Bash Bug, CVE-2014-6271, and CVE-204-7169). We have reviewed how ShellShock is being exploited, and the disclosed vectors are not applicable to our UserInsight deployment, yet we're following the security community's lead around patching all of our systems. In case other systems on your network have been compromised, you should be extra vigilant about suspicio

3 min Vulnerability Disclosure

Bash the bash bug: Here's how to scan for CVE-2014-6271 (Shellshock)

__ A severe vulnerability was disclosed in bash that is present on most Linux, BSD, and Unix-like systems, including Mac OS X. The basis of this vulnerability (nicknamed Shellshock) is that bash does not stop processing after the function definition, leaving it vulnerable to malicious functions containing trailing commands. Common Vulnerabilities and Exp

5 min API

Working with reports and exports via the RPC API

The Metasploit RPC API provides a straightforward, programmatic way to accomplish basic tasks with your Metasploit Pro instance. Two of the key capabilities are export generation to backup your data and report generation to summarize and share your findings. The RPC API docs are currently undergoing a major overhaul and are a bit out of date for reports and export generation. This post will provide all the examples and configuration options you need to get running. Setting up a client to make t

5 min IT Ops

Cloud Platforms vs. On-Prem - A Guide for the Rest of Us

Working for Cloud based businesses for the greater part of a decade now, one question invariably comes up: “Why should I move my data to the cloud?” There are always a few objections that come up as well. Following-up on a previous blog post where we discussed the business benefits of cloud computing , this will be a discussion on the most common objections and how to have a conversation around cloud and on-premise envir

1 min Metasploit

New "show missing" Command in msfconsole

Hello, Metasploiters! Just wanted to update y'all on a new feature in msfconsole that *hopefully* should make vgrepping through module options a little easier. Show empty required options The new command is show missing, and all it does is show empty required options. Instead of looking through a long list of options and picking out the required ones that haven't been set, just run show missing, and a list of unset required

2 min IT Ops

E2N Reduces Anxiety and Increases Customer Satisfaction with Log Data

E2NGastro is a small startup in Germany, who provide a SaaS platform for restaurant management, staff management, timekeeping, and work schedules (among other services). We spoke with their CEO/CTO, Bjorn Raupach, who shared the history behind their use of log data. Before using a log management tool , E2N had log files, but they were difficult to locate. To access them, you had

4 min IT Ops

3 Common Problems Solved With JSON

One of the most common questions we get asked by customers is: “What’s the best way to log my data?” My answer is always: “log using JSON format wherever possible.” The next question we often get asked – (but not as much)… Yeah JSON, …Hmmm, what is JSON again? So JSON is:JavaScriptObjectNotation. But put simply, this is a way that data can be stored in a structured format, where each piece of data will usually have an identifier (known as a key) and a value (which can be in multiple forma

4 min IT Ops

7 Benefits of Cloud Computing for Non-Technical Techies

Much has been written about the cloud. What it is , where it is , how it works , etc. This isn’t going to be a rehash of those questions. This is a cloud computing guide for the non-developer or non-operations guy. The goal of this post is to lay the groundwork for a further discussion: of cloud vs. on-premise, an

2 min

HacmeBank & HacmeCasino in the Cloud | Free Windows Security Trainings

After Metasploitable in the Cloud and bWAPP , CTF365 has increase both, the number of "vulnerable by design" servers and operating systems by adding HacmeBank and HacmeCasino as vulnerable web applications courtesy to McAfee through Fundstone. The machines runs on Windows Server 2008 and WindowXP thanks to Microsoft through their Bizspark Startup Program and they are acces

1 min Windows

Mitigating Service Account Credential Theft

I am excited to announce a new whitepaper, Mitigating Service Account Credential Theft on Windows. This paper was a collaboration between myself, Joe Bialek of Microsoft, and Ashwath Murthy of Palo Alto Networks. The executive summary is shown below, Over the last 15 years, the Microsoft Windows ecosystem has expanded with the meteoric rise of the internet, business technology, and computing in gene

2 min Incident Response

Single Pane of Glass Series: FireEye Threat Analytics Platform (TAP)

As UserInsight grows and we look to add value to more incident response teams that have already chosen the solution that serves as their "single pane of glass", this series will update you on the integrations we build to share valuable context with those solutions. The Solution While FireEye and Mandiant were separately disrupting the security industry, they obtained a great deal of threat intelligence and indicators of compromise along the way. The FireEye Threat Analytics Platform (TAP for sh