All Posts

In Our Customers’ Words: Why Mastering Application Security Basics Matters

In a recent conversation with a Rapid7 application security customer, I was reminded how much of a security practitioner’s day can be consumed by troubleshooting buggy tools and manually executing the same tasks over and over again (needlessly, may I add). As much as we’d like to think that security professionals’ time is being efficiently utilized, oftentimes inadequate tools, a lack of automation, and organizational silos impede SecOps-driven progress

2 min InsightIDR

Deception Technology in InsightIDR: Setting Up Honeypots

In order to overcome the adversary, we must first seek to understand. By understanding how attackers operate, and what today’s modern network looks like from an attacker’s perspective, it’s possible to deceive an attacker, or at least have warning around internal network compromise. Today, let’s touch on a classic deception technology that continues to evolve: the honeypot. Honeypots are de

2 min Metasploit Weekly Wrapup

Metasploit Wrapup: 6/22/18

Welcome to another installment of the week! This installment features a new ETERNALBLUE module in everyone's favorite reptile-brain language, Python! Sporting support for Windows 8 and 10, it has everything you need, including immutable strings and enforced whitespace. In other Windows 10 news, chervalierly fixed an annoying bug in rex-powershell that prevented PsExec from working on later versions of Windows 10. Now, you can PsExec to your heart’s content. Go f

6 min Automation and Orchestration

Deception Technology in InsightIDR: Setting Up Honey Users

Having the ability to detect and respond to user authentication attempts is a key feature of InsightIDR , Rapid7’s threat detection and incident response solution . Users can take this ability one step further by deploying deception technology, like honey users, which come built into the product. A honey user is a dummy user not associated with a real person within your organization. B

4 min Customer Perspective

Why Bow Valley College Gives Rapid7 InsightVM High Marks for Vulnerability Management

Bow Valley College uses InsightVM dashboards to identify quick wins, measure success, and communicate to senior leadership. James Cairns, database administrator at Bow Valley College, gave us a look into their vulnerability management journey with Rapid7. It’s my job to assess vulnerabilities, facilitate patching, and work with the rest of my infrastructure team to optimize our resources in order to stay on top of security issues. As the database administrator for Bow Valley College in Calgary,

5 min IoT

Security Impact of Easily Accessible UART on IoT Technology

When it comes to securing IoT devices, it’s important to know that Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) ports are often the keys to the kingdom for device analysis when you have physical access. For example, as part of ongoing security research and testing projects on embedded technology we own, I have opened up a number of devices and discovered a majority of them having UART enabled. Those with UART enabled have—in every case—provided a path to full root access and allowed me to

2 min Metasploit Weekly Wrapup

Metasploit Wrapup: 6/15/18

New Privilege Escalation Exploit The glibc 'realpath()' module was added by bcoles . It attempts to gain root privileges on Debian-based Linux systems by exploiting a vulnerability in GNU C Library (glibc) version <= 2.26. This exploit uses halfdog's RationalLove exploit to expose a buffer underflow error in glibc realpath() and create a SUID root shell. The module includes offset

7 min Penetration Testing

How to Create a Secure and Portable Kali Installation

The following is a guest post from Rapid7 customer Bo Weaver. Hi, everyone. I’m Bo, a penetration tester at CompliancePoint (and also a customer of Rapid7). If you’re just getting started in penetration testing , or are simply interested in the basics, this blog is for you. An Intro to Kali Kali Linux is an open source project that is maintained and funded by Offensive Security , a provider of inform

4 min Threat Intel

A Common Retailer Dark Web Profile: What We Found in Our Search

In this post, we share examples of common retailer data found across the Dark Web and build a “Dark Web profile” for a typical retail company.

5 min Phishing

Phishing Attacks Duping Your Users? Here’s a Better Anti-Phishing Strategy.

You’ve hired the best of the best and put up the right defenses, but one thing keeps slipping in the door: phishing emails. Part of doing business today, unfortunately, is dealing with phishing attacks . Few organizations are immune to phishing anymore; it’s on every security team’s mind and has become the number one threat to organizations

2 min Application Security

New InsightAppSec Releases: Compliance Reports and the AppSec Toolkit

Things are always brewing in Rapid7 product development. Today, we’re excited to announce several exciting new features in InsightAppSec, our cloud-powered application security testing solution for modern web apps . These include: * Custom reports for PCI, HIPAA, SOX, and OWASP 2017 compliance requirements * PDF report generation * The Rapid7 AppSec Toolkit * Macro Recorder * Traffic Viewer * RegEx Builder * Swagger/Rest API Utilit

2 min InsightIDR

How to detect SMBv1 scanning and SMBv1 established connections

How to use network traffic analysis (NTA) to detect SMBv1 scanning and SMBv1 established connections.

4 min Automation and Orchestration

How Security Orchestration and Automation Will Unite Infosec

After working in the security industry for 15 years, one of the consistent themes I’ve observed is how teams struggle with balancing the increasing amount of work they have to do, without an increase in resources to accomplish their goals. But there’s another, less obvious problem that I like to refer to as a different kind of SaaS: “security as a silo.” It should be no surprise that large organizations frequently struggle with silos that create friction and miscommunication—barriers that get i

2 min Patch Tuesday

Patch Tuesday - June 2018

This month's Patch Tuesday is rather run-of-the-mill, with a total of 50 vulnerabilities being addressed by Microsoft. However, a bit of excitement came earlier this month, with an out-of-band patch for Adobe Flash Player released last Thursday to fix four security issues. Two of these were flaws that can lead