Posts by Tod Beardsley

3 min Vulnerability Disclosure

How Poisonous is VENOM (CVE-2015-3456) to your Virtual Environments?

Today CrowdStrike disclosed VENOM [http://venom.crowdstrike.com/] (Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation) or CVE-2015-3456 [http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-3456], a vulnerability that could allow an attacker with access to one virtual machine to compromise the host system and access the data of other virtual machines. It's been a few months since we've seen a branded and logo'd vulnerability disclosure, and the main question everyone wants to know is wh

3 min

Weekly Metasploit Wrapup: Stageless Meterpreter and the Revenge of Stuxnet

Stageless Meterpreter Remember the Metasploit Pop Quiz [/2015/02/26/weekly-metasploit-wrapup] we ran about a month back? Well, we got tons of support from you, the Metasploit users, and have been picking out what you want to see and have started turning those wishes into reality. I know HD [https://twitter.com/hdmoore], Brent [https://twitter.com/busterbcook], and OJ [https://twitter.com/TheColonial] are working up a much more exhaustive blog post for next week to lay out what's going where and

2 min Android

R7-2015-02: Google Play Store X-Frame-Options (XFO) Gaps Enable Android Remote Code Execution (RCE)

Vulnerability Summary Due to a lack of complete coverage for X-Frame-Options [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/X-Frame-Options] (XFO) support on Google's Play Store [https://play.google.com/] web application domain, a malicious user can leverage either a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in a particular area of the Google Play Store web application, or a Universal XSS (UXSS) targeting affected browsers, to remotely install and launch the main intent of an arbitrary Play S

6 min

Google No Longer Provides Patches for WebView Jelly Bean and Prior

Over the past year, independent researcher Rafay Baloch [https://twitter.com/rafaybaloch] (of "Rafay's Hacking Articles") and Rapid7's Joe Vennix [https://twitter.com/joevennix] have been knocking out Android WebView exploits somewhat routinely, based both on published research and original findings. Today, Metasploit ships with 11 such exploits, thanks to Rafay, Joe, and the rest of the open source security community. Generally speaking, these exploits affect "only" Android 4.3 and prior -- ei

3 min

Metasploit Weekly Wrapup: Get the 411

Metasploit Version 4.11 Released This week, we released Metasploit version 4.11 to the world -- feel free to download it here [http://www.rapid7.com/products/metasploit/download.jsp] if you're the sort that prefers the binary install over the somewhat Byzantine procedure for setting up a development environment [http://r-7.co/MSF-DEV]. Which you should be, because the binary installers (for Windows and Linux) have all the dependencies baked in and you don't have to monkey around with much to ge

3 min

Thank You! Five Years of Metasploit at Rapid7

On October 20, 2009 -- five years ago today -- Rapid7 acquired Metasploit. At the time, there was skepticism about the deal, and what it would mean for Metasploit and the open source community. The skepticism was, of course, fair. If Rapid7 was going to fund (and therefore, control) the development of the Metasploit Framework, why would anyone contribute to it any more? Why give away work product for free when Rapid7 is just going to turn around and sell it? Today, Metasploit is still actively

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 [https://twitter.com/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,

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

2 min Events

Metasploit Race to Root and Loginpalooza

Race to Root Unless you've gotten to this blog by freak accident, you are certain to be aware that next week is Black Hat USA 2014, and of course, we'll be there. You can find us at Booth #541, where we'll be running the Metasploit Race to Root, using the latest pre-release build of Metasploit Pro. Now, this is not just a contest to see who can get their badge scanned the fastest. Oh no. This is a real, hands-on micro-sized capture the flag competition, run by our capable and talented in-house

3 min Events

Weekly Metasploit Update: Countdown to DEFCON

Don't Be (too) Naked in Vegas Wow, it's exactly two more weeks today until DEFCON. While Rapid7 has had a vendor presence at Black Hat for many years (at booth #541), this year is, I believe, the first time that we'll have a vendor table at DEFCON. I'm super stoked about both gigs, since the Black Hat booth will give us an opportunity to unload give away a fresh new batch of Metasploit T-Shirt Design contest [http://99designs.com/t-shirt-design/contests/metasploit-design-contest-375195/brief]

3 min Metasploit

Weekly Metasploit Update: Embedded Device Attacks and Automated Syntax Analysis

D-Link Embedded Device Shells This week, esteemed Metasploit [https://www.metasploit.com/download/] contributor @m-1-k-3 [https://github.com/m-1-k-3] has been at it again with his valiant personal crusade against insecure SOHO (small office/home office) embedded devices with known vulnerabilities. We have a new trio of modules that target D-Link gear, based on the research released by Craig Heffner and Zachary Cutlip, which exploit two bugs present in the DSP-W215 Smart Plug, and one UPnP comma

2 min

Weekly Metasploit Update: Another Meterpreter Evasion Option

Hopping Meterpreter Through PHP This week, Metasploit landed and shipped the new Reverse HTTP hop stager [https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/pull/2809] for Meterpreter payloads, which opens up yet another avenue for pivoting about the Internet to connect to your various and sundry Meterpreter shells. This is kind of a huge deal. For starters, this obviously helps with crossing artificial borders between networks. You may have an engagement target that has a vulnerable web server in

3 min

Metasploit Weekly Update: Blinding Defenders by Poking at Wireshark

The Wireshark DoS Module This week, we have an interesting new module from Metasploit community contributor JoseMi [https://github.com/jholgui], which exercises a (seeming) denial-of-service (DoS) condition in a Wireshark dissector responsible for decoding CAPWAP packets. No, I've never heard of CAPWAP either, but Wikipedia's article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capwap], now I'm an expert! At any rate, it's not a protocol that you would expect to find really anywhere, given that no real wir

1 min Metasploit

2014 Metasploit T-Shirt Design Contest

Hey Hacker-Designers! Remember about this time last year, we kicked off the Metasploit T-Shirt design contest [/2013/05/03/metasploits-10th-anniversary-laptop-decal-design-competition]to commemorate our shipping of 1,000 exploits and Metasploit's 10th Anniversary? Turns out, we had so many good designs [/2013/07/16/metasploit-design-contest-winners] and so much fun with that that we're doing it again this year. So let's see, what reason can we contrive this year... We have 1,294 exploits now

3 min Exploits

Metasploit's Brand New Heartbleed Scanner Module (CVE-2014-0160)

Is the Internet down? Metasploit publishes module for Heartbleed If you read this blog at all regularly, you're quite likely the sort of Internet citizen who has heard about the Heartbleed attack and grasp how serious this bug is. It's suffice to say that it's a Big Deal -- one of those once-a-year bugs that kicks everyone in security into action. OpenSSL underpins much of the security of the Internet, so widespread bugs in these critical libraries affects everyone. The subsequently published