All Posts

Building a Car Hacking Development Workbench: Part 2

This is part two of a three-part series. Part one covered how to build a development workbench. Part two of this series will cover reading electrical diagrams and serve as a primer for part three, where we will re-engineer common circuit types found in vehicles. Electrical Diagrams & Re-identification Technically, your bench is complete at this point, and you can connect an OBD-II to USB conversion device to start interpreting

1 min

Cleaning House: Maintaining an accurate and relevant vulnerability management program

When Nexpose launched in the early 2000s, technology was vastly different from the world we live in today: most people connected to the internet over dial-up modems, personal computers were shared within the household, and televisions were still set-top boxes. Technology has evolved dramatically since then, and Rapid7's vulnerability management solutions have evolved to meet the needs of secur

10 min Hacking

Building a Car Hacking Development Workbench: Part 1

Introduction There is a vast body of knowledge hiding inside your car. Whether you are an auto enthusiast, developer, hobbyist, security researcher, or just curious about vehicles, building a development bench can be an exciting project to facilitate understanding and experimentation without risking possible damage to your vehicle. This is a perfect project for people of a wide range of ages and skill levels. Even if you have never worked on a car before, or you do not feel like your Electronics

3 min Automation and Orchestration

Understanding Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Network (DMVPN)

Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Network (DMVPN) is a solution which enables the data to transfer from one site to another, without having the verification process of traffic.

4 min Automation and Orchestration

Information Security Risk Management Cycle - Overview

Synopsis Information security risk management is a wide topic, with many notions, processes, and technologies that are often confused with each other. In this series of articles, I explain notions and describe processes related to risk management. I also review NIST and ISO standards related to information security risk management. In theprevious article ,

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 improvements

3 min Automation and Orchestration

How to Install and Configure AIDE on Ubuntu Linux

Synopsys Aide also known as Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment is an open source host based file and directory integrity checker. It is a replacement for the well-known Tripwire integrity checker that can be used to monitor filesystem for unauthorized change. It is very usefull when someone placing a backdoor on your web site and make changes that may take your system down completely. Aide creates a database from your filesystem and stores various file attributes like permissions, inode nu

7 min Automation and Orchestration

How to Install and Configure OSSEC on Ubuntu Linux.

Synopsys OSSEC is an open source host-based intrusion detection system that can be used to keep track of servers activity. It supports most operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, Solaris and much more. It is used to monitor one server or multiple servers in server/agent mode and give you a real-time view into what’s happening on your server. OSSEC has a cross-platform architecture that enables you to monitor multiple systems from centralized location. In this tutorial, we w

5 min Public Policy

Copyright Office Calls For New Cybersecurity Researcher Protections

On Jun. 22, the US Copyright Office released its long-awaited study on Sec. 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and it has important implications for independent cybersecurity researchers. Mostly the news is very positive. Rapid7 advocated extensively for researcher protections to be built into this report, submitting two sets of detailed comments—see here

4 min Ransomware

Petya-like ransomworm: Leveraging InsightVM and Nexpose for visibility into MS17-010

A Petya-like ransomworm struck on June 27th 2017 and spread throughout the day, affecting organizations in several European countries and the US. It is believed that the ransomworm may achieve its initial infection via a malicious document attached to a phishing email, and that it then leverages the EternalBlue and DoublePulsar exploits to spread laterally. Once in

6 min Komand

10 Steps Towards the Path of Better Security for Your Business

Information security is hard. So hard, in fact, that many choose to ignore it as an intractable problem, and choose to ignore it wherever possible. They use the same password everywhere, carry sensitive data around on unencrypted laptops which they then leave on public transportation, run old applications on old operating systems, and a plethora of other such security issues. In an alarmingly-large number of data breaches, attackers do not resort to zero-day attacks or secret blackhat hacker te

4 min Microsoft

Petya-like Ransomware Explained

TL;DR summary (7:40 PM EDT June 28): A major ransomware attack started in Ukraine yesterday and has spread around the world. The ransomware, which was initially thought to be a modified Petya variant, encrypts files on infected machines and uses multiple mechanisms to both gain entry to target networks and to spread laterally. Several research teams are reporting that once victims' disks are encrypted, they cannot be decrypted

2 min Vulnerability Disclosure

R7-2017-06 | CVE-2017-5241: Biscom SFT XSS (FIXED)

Summary The Workspaces component of Biscom Secure File Transfer (SFT) version 5.1.1015 is vulnerable to stored cross-site scripting in two fields. An attacker would need to have the ability to create a Workspace and entice a victim to visit the malicious page in order to run malicious Javascript in the context of the victim's browser. Since the victim is necessarily authenticated, this can allow the attacker to perform actions on the Biscom Secure File Transfer instance on the victim's behalf.

2 min Public Policy

Legislation to Strengthen IoT Marketplace Transparency

Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) is poised to introduce legislation to develop a voluntary cybersecurity standards program for the Internet of Things (IoT). The legislation, called the Cyber Shield Act, would enable IoT products that comply with the standards to display a label indicating a strong level of security to consumers – like an Energy Star rating for IoT. Rapid7 supports this legislation and believes greater transparency in the marketplace will enhance cybersecurity and protect consumers. The

2 min Automation and Orchestration

Setting Up and Managing a Bug Bounty Program

Synopsis Bug bounties have become mainstream and rightfully so. They offer a method to access and harness the intelligence of varied set of expert hackers and security researchers without having to incur the cost of hiring an army of security professionals. The main advantage though is that one can keep a step ahead of the malicious hackers. This article talks about how to setup a bug bounty program and some of the pitfalls to watch out for. When to do a Bug Bounty ? One obvious question that w