All Posts

13 min

Metasploit Gems From Scratch

Introduction As Metasploit adopts community best practices related to testing and code structure, we've started breaking up our new (and part of our old) work into separate projects that can developed and tested independently.  These smaller projects take the form of Ruby gems and Rails::Engines.  As we've made more and more gems, we've gotten a repeatable process for making new gems, but we thought our process might we useful for other developers in the community that are looking for a newer gu

5 min IT Ops

How to Avoid the Big Data Black Hole

It takes a lot of will power, in our data obsessed world to say “too much!” However, there are many ways where too much information is destroying productivity, and actually causing bad decision making, not good. But it is hard to avoid the world of opportunities that has been opened in data collection and analysis. So how do you balance the two? The first step is to understand there is a big difference between data collection, and it’s utilization. While it seems subtle, the difference is key, a

2 min Microsoft

Patch Tuesday - September 2014

It's a light round of Microsoft Patching this month.  Only four advisories, of which only one is critical.  The sole critical issue this month is the expected Internet Explorer roll up affecting all supported (and likely some unsupported) versions.  This IE roll up addresses 36 privately disclosed Remote Code Execution issues and 1 publically disclosed Information Disclosure issue which is under limited attack in the wild. This will be the top patching priority for this month. Of the three no

3 min IT Ops

Scaling with RESTful Microservice Architecture

As described in a previous post on this blog, we have been using the Dropwizard framework to quickly develop high quality, easily testable , RESTful microservices to expand the functionality of our product. These complement the existing multi-instance services running in our cluster and contribute to the continued scaling of the Logentries service.  Both i

2 min

AIX coverage: See what you need to see

In a huge refinement to IBM AIX vulnerability coverage, Nexpose version 5.10.8 and later scans AIX machines for a specific set of patches related to known vulnerabilities. This more focused approach provides easier management of AIX machines by allowing you to see very quickly how affected systems are vulnerable and which solutions need to be applied. As Nexpose searches only for vulnerabilities, the scans are significantly faster. This allows you to stay up to date with the published vulnerabi

2 min

How do You USB?

All the perimeter protection in the world won't stop an attack that doesn't get checked by the security measures around your perimeter, assuming the perimeter is still a viable term in today's distributed, mobile, and virtual world.  If an attacker were to drop a USB stick in a public area of your company, what are the chances that USB stick eventually finds a USB port? Pretty good.

4 min IT Ops

Monitoring & Analyzing AWS CloudTrail Data From Multiple AWS Regions

We recently released AWS CloudTrail integration with Logentries – and not surprisingly we’ve seen a significant uptick in adoption as one of our most popular integrations. My job as director of customer success is to make things as simple for our customers as possible. One question that consistently pops up, is how to collect AWS CloudTrail logs from multiple AWS regions. We follow Amazon’s best practices

6 min Metasploit

Not Reinventing The Wheel: The Metasploit Rails::Application in 4.10

In Metasploit 4.10, we converted Metasploit Framework (and prosvc in Metasploit Commercial Editions) to be a full-fledged Rails::Application.  You may be wondering why Metasploit Framework and prosvc, should be Rails applications when they aren't serving up web pages.  It all has to do with not reinventing the wheel and very useful parts of Rails, Rails::Railtie and Rails::Engine. Rails 3.0 infrastructure Since Rails 3.0, Rails has been broken into multiple gems that didn't require each other a

2 min Nexpose

Software defined security made real

This week were headed for VMworld 2014 in San Fransisco and we're excited to be talking about how Rapid7 is partnering with industry leaders like Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, and of course VMware to build out the VMware NSX security ecosystem . Together we've created an integrated system that collaborates together leveraging the NSX platform to automate risk identification and mitigation for VMware customers

9 min Vulnerability Disclosure

R7-2014-12: More Amplification Vulnerabilities in NTP Allow Even More DRDoS Attacks

Overview As part of Rapid7 Labs' Project Sonar , among other things, we scan the entire public IPv4 space (minus those who have opted out) looking for listening NTP servers.  During this research we discovered some unknown NTP servers responding to our probes with messages that were entirely unexpected.  This lead to the writing of an NTP fuzzer in Metasploit

3 min IT Ops

How to Integrate Go / GoLang with Logentries

Would you like to send logs from your Go program code into your Logentries account?Thanks to the help of Gal Ben-Haim’s, bsphere Golang library for log entries , Go coders can be sending their logs to Logentries in no time at all. Benefits of using this Go Lang library and implementing with your Logentries account include: * Remote viewing and analysis of your Go program log events * All your logs are sent to one location, and viewed through an easy to use

2 min Metasploit

Feedback on Rapid7's Tech Preview Process and Metasploit Pro 4.10

By guest blogger Sean Duffy, IS Team Lead, TriNet Rapid7 invited me to participate in pre-release testing of Metasploit 4.10, a process they call Tech Preview. They asked me to openly share my thoughts with the community. Preparation and Logistics I always enjoy working with Rapid7. Preparatory meetings and documentation made the installation and testing process a breeze. Rapid7 was also kind enough to extend my testing and feedback sessions when work so rudely intruded on the fun. Zero comp

4 min Events

More SNMP Information Leaks: CVE-2014-4862 and CVE-2014-4863

Today, Rapid7 would like to disclose a pair of newly discovered vulnerabilities around consumer and SOHO-grade cable modems, the Arris DOCSIS 3.0 (aka, Touchstone cable modems) and Netmaster Wireless Cable Modems. Both exposures were discovered by Rapid7's Deral Percent_X Heiland and independent researcher Matthew Kienow. The duo plan to discuss these and other common vulnerabilities and configuration issues at DerbyCon near the end of September. In the meantime,

3 min IT Ops

Real-time Alerting on Anomaly and Inactivity Made Simple.

“a·nom·a·ly” 1. Deviation or departure from the normal or common order, form, or rule. When someone is looking to be alerted when something unexpected happens within their environment they are usually referring to anomaly detection. But the problem is that it’s hard to turn a complex problem (i.e. looking for something when you are not sure what it is) into an easy to use solution. The thing about anomaly detection is that you don’t know how the issue will present itself so predicting the patte

1 min Metasploit

msfconsole failing to start? Try 'msfconsole -n'

As part of the last release, the Metasploit Engineering team here at Rapid7 has been on a path of refactoring in the Metasploit open source code in order to make it more performant and to get toward a larger goal of eventually breaking up the framework into a multitude of libraries that can be used and tested in a standalone way. This effort will make it easier to deliver features and respond to issues more quickly, as well as ensure that regressions and bugs can get diagnosed, triaged, and fix