All Posts

Security Budget Tips, from CISOs, for CISOs

CISO Series: Budgeting I have provided a brief overview of the genesis of the CISO series , and now it is time to tackle our first topic: security budgets. Whether you're the CISO of a large public company or leading security at an early-stage startup, rich in headcount or forced to be tight with the purse strings, reporting into the CIO, COO, or elsewhere in the organization, the fact remains that budget conversations are among the most critical and

4 min IT Ops

Unleash the power of node.js for Shell Scripting (Part 2)

Ready for our first proper node.js Script! In a previous post , we learned about some tools that helped us create a script in node.js. It is now time to put this into practice by implementing a script that connects to a few online newspapers, searches in the news for specific keywords and returns those articles. Our new script will need to accept the following parameters: * A file with the list of newspapers (one URL per li

2 min Verizon DBIR

What is VERIS?

Data driven security is all the rage, and laughably few of us encode and analyze our programs… and for good reason. It isn't easy. This post will talk about VERIS, a framework for describing security incidents in a precise way. We all have a plan, a security program, compliance regulations, and super busy calendars—but what is working? The answer is hidden in plain sight, it just needs to be analyzed. And this is why we all love the DBIR. If you aren't familiar with Verizon's DBIR (Data Breach

8 min IT Ops

Java 8: A quick introduction to Parallelism and the Spliterator

Introduction With the release of Java 8 a number of new language features were introduced . These included lambda functions, streams and completable futures. Colleagues of mine have already reviewed these features in previous articles on this blog, which I recommend reading as part of this topic . In this article I will touch on an aspect of the Java 8 release that relates to the push towards exploiting parallelism, in the context of the existing Collections Framework – specifically

5 min Public Policy

New DMCA Exemption is a Positive Step for Security Researchers

Today the Library of Congress officially publishes its rule-making for the latest round of exemption requests for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The advance notice of its findings revealed some good news for security researchers as the rule-making includes a new exemption to the DMCA for security research: “(i) Computer programs, where the circumvention is undertaken on a lawfully acquired device or

2 min Exploits

8 Reasons Why SQL Injection Vulnerabilities Still Exist

Knowing how to prevent a SQL injection vulnerability is only half the web application security battle. A multitude of factors come into play when it comes to writing secure code, many of which are out of the developers' direct control. That's why common vulnerabilities like SQL injection continue to plague today's applications, and why application security testing software is so important. These problems can be overcome – with a little

3 min AppSpider

Mobile application security: Lock the back door!

Mobile application security A few years ago, Sean Gallagher wrote this article that we believe outlines one of the most important areas of application security risk today, mobile application security. In his article for Ars Technica, “Mobile Application Security: Always Keep the Back Door Locked,” Gallagher outlines that its important to address mobile application security because many of the mobile applications we use today access backend middleware and corporate data sources. We have email app

1 min

5 Tips for Dealing with Unusual Traffic Detected Notifications

If you get an "unusual traffic detected" notification from Google, here are five ways to troubleshoot the issue. Learn more.

5 min IT Ops

Unleash the power of node.js for Shell Scripting (Part 1)

Setting Up Running a Node Script We are going to talk about creating shell scripts with node.js. The first thing that you need to do is install node.js. You can get the installers from https://nodejs.org/en/download/, or use your favorite package manager. Let’s go straight in and write our first script. The first thing to do is to create a file called script.js with the following code: console.log('hello world') We can now execute this script by running the following command in our shell:

3 min IT Ops

Logging from Tableau for Successful DataOps

Lately, we’ve been seeing a growing number of customers using Logentries in support of DataOps – the practice of collecting, normalizing and redistributing data throughout an organization so teams can make smarter business decisions. With teams ranging from engineers to support to marketing & sales relying on data for every day decision making, a critical requirement of those within a DataOps role is to actively monitor their organization’s data platforms. I recently had the pleasure of chatt

1 min Metasploit Weekly Wrapup

Metasploit Weekly Wrapup for 2015-10-15

Welcome to this week's Metasploit Wrapup. I'm your host Brent Cook, tagging in for egypt who just finished speaking about Metasploit at the Texas DIR Telecommunications Forum . This week was largely focused on bug fixes and refinements. In the fixes bucket, PowerShell sessions now properly upgrade with the 'sessions -u' command. Fixing this also revealed some general proble

4 min IT Ops

Exploring Lambdas and Streams in Java 8

Java 8 introduced a host of new features, including lambda functions and streams. In this article I will focus on these two features as they are the most impactful features that were added in this new version of Java. Lambda Functions If you ever had to write a GUI for an application with an OO language you’ll understand the pain of writing event handlers, such as a mouse click event. So much boilerplate needed because you had to define a disgusting inline class with a single method. With the

6 min Log Management

10 Best Practices for Log Management and Analytics

Introduction Today’s Log Management and Analytics Challenges Within the last decade, the advancement of distributed systems has introduced new complexities in managing log data. Today’s systems can include thousands of server instances or micro- service containers, each generating its own log data. With the rapid emergence and dominance of cloud-based systems, we have witnessed explosive growth in machine-generated log data. As a result, log management

5 min Project Sonar

Rapid7 Labs' Project Sonar - Nexpose Integration

With the release of Nexpose 5.17, customers were enabled to easily gain an outsider's view of their internet-facing assets. This capability was made possible through integration with Rapid7 Labs' Project Sonar . What is Project Sonar? Project Sonar is a community effort to improve security through the active analysis of public networks. This includes running scans across public internet-facing systems, organizing the results, and sharing the data with the

5 min

TLS Coverage Improvements in Nexpose 6.0.2

Over the last couple of years, some of the most serious and widely publicized vulnerabilities have been related to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Because TLS is so fundamental to keeping network communications secure, new flaws that are discovered can have a disproportionate effect on an organization's risk. From Heartbleed to POODLE , FREAK