Posts by Brendan Watters

11 min Research

Building a Backpack Hypervisor

Researcher, engineer, and Metasploit contributor Brendan Watters shares his experience building a backpack-size hypervisor.

4 min Python

Virtual Machine Automation (vm-automation) repository released

Rapid7 just released a new public repo called vm-automation. The vm-automation repository is a Python library that encapsulates existing methodologies for virtual machine and hypervisor automation and provides a platform-agnostic Python API. Currently, only ESXi and VMWare workstation are supported, but I have high hopes we will support other hypervisors in time, and we would love to see contributors come forward and assist in supporting them! That's awesome. I want to get started now! Great! I

3 min Metasploit Weekly Wrapup

Metasploit Wrapup: June 30, 2017

Metasploit Hackathon We were happy to host the very first Metasploit framework open source hackathon this past week in the Rapid7 Austin. Eight Metasploit hackers from outside of Rapid7 joined forces with the in-house team and worked on a lot of great projects, small and large. @bcook started the hackathon working with @sempervictus on his amazing backlog of framework features, including REX library [https://github.com/rapid7/rex-socket/pull/6] improvements [https://github.com/rapid7/rex-socket

2 min Metasploit

Metasploit Wrapup: June 16, 2017

A fresh, new UAC bypass module for Windows 10! Leveraging the behavior of fodhelper.exe and a writable registry key as a normal user, you too can be admin! Unpatched as of last week, this bypass module [https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/pull/8434] works on Windows 10 only, but it works like a charm! Reach out and allocate something This release offers up a fresh denial/degradation of services exploit against hosts running a vulnerable version of rpcbind. Specifically, you can repea

2 min Metasploit

Metasploit Wrapup 6/2/17

It has only been one week since the last wrapup, so it's not like much could have happened, right? Wrong! Misery Loves Company After last week's excitement with Metasploit's version of ETERNALBLUE (AKA the Wannacry vulnerability) [https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/exploit/windows/smb/ms17_010_eternalblue], this week SAMBA had its own "Hold My Beer" moment with the disclosure that an authenticated (or anonymous) client can upload a shared library to a SAMBA server, and that server will happily e