Upcoming Rapid7 Webcast: How Far Does Your VRM Strategy Go?

Web applications have been growing in complexity over the past several years, while also becoming the preferred method for attackers looking to capitalize on emergent technologies. This is a trend that will only persist and evolve, so it’s crucial to extend your web application testing strategy t...

Predicting the Unpredictable: What Will the Cybersecurity Space Look Like in 2021?

Not to start off another blog post about how insane this year has been, but let’s just take a moment to appreciate HOW INSANE THIS YEAR HAS BEEN. As I sat down to write this blog post, I took a look at last year’s predictions post and was amused to see how little we knew about what was coming. An...

How to Gain Visibility Into Audit Logs for Policy Customization in InsightVM

Since the launch of InsightVM’s Custom Policy Builder in June of this year, hundreds of organizations have created and customized secure configuration policies. While the standard CIS and DISA benchmarks are, by default, great for an organization to kickstart their policy and compliance program,...

NICER Protocol Deep Dive: Internet Exposure of Microsoft SQL Server (MS SQL) (UDP/1434)

Welcome to the NICER Protocol Deep Dive blog series! When we started researching what all was out on the internet way back in January, we had no idea we'd end up with a hefty, 137-page tome of a research report. The sheer length of such a thing might put off folks who might otherwise learn a thin...

2021 Detection and Response Planning, Part 3: Why 2021 Is the Year for SOC Automation

In this third installment of our series around 2021 security planning, we’re focused on SOC automation. In part one, we spoke with Rapid7 Detection and Response Practice Advisor, Jeffrey Gardner on tips and advice for ramping up annual security planning. In part two, we discussed how reliable,...

Metasploit Wrap-Up 04/04/2025

New RCEs Metasploit added four new modules this week, including three that leverage vulnerabilities to obtain remote code execution RCE. Among these three, two leverage deserialization, showing that the exploit primitive is still going strong. The Tomcat vulnerability in particular CVE-2025-24813...

Helpful tools to get started in IoT Assessments

The Internet of Things IoT can be a daunting field to get into. With many different tools and products available on the market it can be confusing to even know where to start. Having performed dozens of IoT assessments, I felt it would be beneficial to compile a basic list of items that are...

Stories from the SOC Part 1: IDAT Loader to BruteRatel

Rapid7’s Managed Detection and Response MDR team continuously monitors our customers' environments, identifying emerging threats and developing new detections. In August 2023, Rapid7 identified a new malware loader named the IDAT Loader. Malware loaders are a type of malicious software designed t...

Rapid7’s Mid-Year Threat Review

It will come as little surprise to most people that cyber threats in 2023 have been rather prolific. From widely exploited vulnerabilities to high-profile ransomware and extortion campaigns, the first half of the year has seen more than its fair share of large-scale incidents. Rapid7’s 2023...

New InsightCloudSec Compliance Pack: Implementing and Enforcing ISO 27001:2022

James Alaniz and Diamond Fair contributed to this article. We’ve been on quite a roll lately releasing new compliance packs, along with iterative updates to others that we’ve supported for a while now. We’re not done yet, either! In this article, we’ll discuss our newly released compliance pack f...

Network Access for Sale: Protect Your Organization Against This Growing Threat

Vulnerable network access points are a potential gold mine for threat actors who, once inside, can exploit them persistently. Many cybercriminals are not only interested in obtaining personal information but also seek corporate information that could be sold to the highest bidder. Infiltrating...

Evaluating the Security of an Enterprise IoT Deployment at Domino's Pizza

Recently, I had a great opportunity to work with Domino's Pizza to evaluate an internally conceived Internet of Things IoT-based business solution they had designed and deployed throughout their US store locations. The goal of this research project was to understand the security implications arou...

Metasploit Weekly Wrap-Up

Capture Plugin Capturing credentials is a critical and early phase in the playbook of many offensive security testers. Metasploit has facilitated this for years with protocol-specific modules all under the auxiliary/server/capture. Users can start and configure each of these modules individually,...

Rapid7 Recognized as a Strong Performer in the Inaugural Forrester Wave™ for MDR, Q1 2021

Independent research firm cites Rapid7 MDR’s “security professionals with extensive incident response and threat hunting experience” delivering a “white-glove, behavioral detection-inspired” service. Detection and response is a critical component to any security program, but standing up an...

Congrats to the winners of the 2020 December Metasploit community CTF

Thank you all that participated in the 2020 December Metasploit community CTF! The four day CTF was well received by the community, with 874 teams and 1903 users registered! We’ve included the high-level stats and the competition winners below. If you played the CTF and want to let the Metasploit...

Critical VMware vCenter Vulnerabilities Allow Authentication Bypass and Remote Code Execution (CVE-2026-59309, CVE-2026-59310)

Overview On July 29, 2026, Broadcom published security advisory VMSA-2026-0006 addressing multiple vulnerabilities in several VMWare products. Included in the advisory are two critical remotely exploitable vulnerabilities affecting VMware vCenter Server: CVE-2026-59309 and CVE-2026-59310. Both...

CVE-2026-0826: How an Old Bug Can Feed AI-Powered Impersonation

One of the more persistent myths in security is that old bug classes become old problems. They don’t. They just show up in different places, under different conditions, and usually at the exact moment we’ve convinced ourselves not to pay attention to them. That’s part of what makes enterprise voi...

CVE-2025-13315, CVE-2025-13316: Critical Twonky Server Authentication Bypass (NOT FIXED)

Overview Twonky Server version 8.5.2 is susceptible to two vulnerabilities that facilitate administrator authentication bypass on Linux and Windows. An unauthenticated attacker can improperly access a privileged web API endpoint to leak application logs, which contain encrypted administrator...

Metasploit Weekly Wrap-Up: 11/15/2024

Palo Alto Expedition RCE module This week's release includes an exploit module for the Palo Alto Expedition exploit chain that's been making headlines recently. The first vulnerability, CVE-2024-5910, allows attackers to reset the password of the admin user. The second vulnerability, CVE-2024-946...

Metasploit Weekly Wrap-Up 09/13/2024

SPIP Modules This week brings more modules targeting the SPIP publishing platform. SPIP has gained some attention from Metasploit community contributors recently and has inspired some PHP payload and encoder improvements. New module content 2 SPIP BigUp Plugin Unauthenticated RCE Authors: Julien...

Metasploit Weekly Wrap-Up 05/03/24

Dump secrets inline This week, our very own cdelafuente-r7 added a significant improvement to the well-known Windows Secrets Dump module to reduce the footprint when dumping SAM hashes, LSA secrets and cached credentials. The module is now directly reading the Windows Registry remotely without...

Enforce and Report on PCI DSS v4 Compliance with Rapid7

The PCI Security Standards Council PCI SSC is a global forum that connects stakeholders from the payments and payment processing industries to craft and facilitate adoption of data security standards and relevant resources that enable safe payments worldwide. According to the PCI SSC website, “PC...

Peeking into the crystal ball: What 2023 cyber threats told us about 2024

By Raj Samani, SVP Chief Scientist, and Sabeen Malik, Vice President, Global Government Affairs and Public Policy at Rapid7 Stepping into 2024 feels like opening the latest best-selling mystery novel – you know there's adventure ahead, but the plot is still up in the air. In the twist-riddled wor...

Starting a Career in Tech? Learn How Rapid7’s Emerging Talent Programmes Foster Long-Term Success

Rapid7’s Emerging Talent Programmes pave the way for early career professionals to have a successful career in tech. In Belfast, we offer both an Apprentice Programme and a Placement Programme to support new talent coming into the tech field. The Apprentice Programme is designed for individuals...

Automating Qakbot Detection at Scale With Velociraptor

In this blog, you will learn a practical methodology to extract configuration data from recent Qakbot samples. I will provide some background on Qakbot, then walk through decode themes in an easy to visualize manner. Additionally, I'll share a Velociraptor artifact to detect and automate the deco...

Rapid7 MDR Named a Market Leader, Again!

New IDC MarketScape Names Rapid7 a Leader in U.S. Managed Detection and Response MDR It’s a big year to be named a Leader. Time magazine said the pandemic produced “the world’s largest work-from-home experiment.” Suddenly, everyone was accessing everything from everywhere. Control moved outside...

[The Lost Bots] Episode 2: Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

!\The Lost Bots\ Episode 2: Extended Detection and Response \XDR\https://blog.rapid7.com/content/images/2021/07/-The-Lost-Bots--Episode-1--External-Threat-Intelligence.jpg Welcome back to The Lost Bots, a new vlog series where Rapid7 Detection and Response Practice Advisor Jeffrey Gardner talks a...

Why the Robot Hackers Aren’t Here (Yet)

“Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.” - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot Hacking and Automation As hackers, we spend a lot of time making things easier for ourselves. For example, you might be aware of a tool called Metasploit, which can be used to make getting...

How COVID-19 Reinforced the Need for Mobile Device Management

How many of you got that call at the beginning of the pandemic to make your company’s workforce 100% capable for remote work? How many of you had no idea how to make that happen, seemingly and sometimes literally overnight? How many of you were already prepared for such an event? Remote workforce...

Ransomware Payments and Sanctions - U.S. Treasury Advisory

On Oct. 1, the United States Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control OFAC issued an advisory concerning ransomware payments and sanctions regulations. The advisory warned that paying ransoms to sanctioned persons and entities risks violating the law. It also notes that OFAC may impos...

Rapid7 Analysis: Check Point SmartConsole Authentication Bypass (CVE-2026-16232)

Overview On July 22, 2026, Check Point published a security advisory for CVE-2026-16232, an authentication bypass in the SmartConsole login process affecting Security Management Server and Multi-Domain Security Management Server MDS. By leveraging CVE-2026-16232, an unauthenticated attacker can...

High-Risk Vulnerabilities in Common Enterprise Technologies

Rapid7 is warning customers about several high-risk vulnerabilities in common enterprise technologies that are attractive potential attack targets for both state-sponsored and financially motivated adversaries. We are advising customers to prioritize remediation for these issues on an expedited...

Metasploit Weekly Wrap-Up 04/12/24

Account Takeover using Shadow Credentials The new release of Metasploit Framework includes a Shadow Credentials module added by smashery used for reliably taking over an Active Directory user account or computer, and letting future authentication to happen as that account. This can be chained wit...

Rapid7 offers continued vulnerability coverage in the face of NVD delays

Recently, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST announced on the National Vulnerability Database NVD site that there would be delays in adding information on newly published CVEs. NVD enriches CVEs with basic details about a vulnerability like the vulnerability’s CVSS score,...

Troubleshooting InsightAppSec Authentication Issues

For complete visibility into the vulnerabilities in your environment, proper authentication to web apps in InsightAppSec is essential. In this article, we’ll look at issues you might encounter with macro, traffic, and selenium authentication and how to troubleshoot them. Additionally, you’ll get...

Metasploit Weekly Wrap-Up

Back from a quiet holiday season Thankfully, it was a relatively quiet holiday break for security this year, so we hope everyone had a relaxing time while they could. This wrapup covers the last three Metasploit releases, and contains three new modules, two updates, and five bug fixes. Make sure...

Architecting for Extortion: Acting on the IST’s Blueprint for Ransomware Defense

Last month, the Institute for Security and Technology’s IST Ransomware Task Force RTF launched the Blueprint for Ransomware Defense, a mitigation, response, and recovery plan for small- and medium-sized enterprises. This action plan is a cross-industry document that targets business leaders and...

3 Ways InsightIDR Users Are Achieving XDR Outcomes

The buzz around extended detection and response XDR is often framed in the future tense — here's what it will be like when we can start bringing more sources of telemetry into our detections, or what will happen when we can use XDR to really start reducing false positives. But users of InsightIDR...

Security for All: How the Rapid7 Cybersecurity Foundation Will Expand Access and Inclusion

Rapid7’s mission is to advance cybersecurity for all — and an essential part of that effort is making the field and its best resources easier to access. That’s why we deliver solutions that meet the needs of large enterprises but can also be deployed and operated by more resource-constrained team...

Turn On, Tune In, Drop the Noise: Achieve Better Cloud Security by Reducing Noise

The modern world is full of signals. A select few are critically important, others are interesting or informative, and the overwhelming majority are less useful or painfully irrelevant. All of these signals that are neither useful nor relevant are best categorized as noise. For security...

The 2021 OWASP Top 10 Have Evolved: Here's What You Should Know

Late last week, the Open Web Application Security Project OWASP released its top 10 list of critical web application security risks. The last OWASP Top 10 came out in 2017, and in the intervening 4 years, we've seen a fundamental shift in application security that includes greater emphasis on...

Hack Back Is Still Wack

Every year or two, we see a policy proposal around authorizing private-sector hack back. The latest of these is legislation from two U.S. Senators, Daines and Whitehouse, and it would require the U.S. Department of Homeland Security DHS to “conduct a study on the potential benefits and risks of...

Proposed security researcher protection under CFAA

Rapid7 views independent cybersecurity research and the security community as important drivers for advancing cybersecurity for all, a core value for Rapid7. One way we take action on this value is by supporting protection for security researchers acting in good faith. We have spoken out on this...

[Security Nation] How Robert Black Wards Off Cyber-Attackers with Deception Techniques

!\Security Nation\ How Robert Black Wards Off Cyber-Attackers with Deception Techniqueshttps://blog.rapid7.com/content/images/2021/05/securitynationlogo-2.jpg In our latest episode of Security Nation, we talk with Robert Black, Deputy Director of the UK National Cyber Deception Lab, about his wor...

Metasploit 2025 Annual Wrap-Up

Hard to believe it's that time again, and that Metasploit Framework will see the dawn of another Annual Wrap-Up and a New Year. All of the metrics and modules you see here would in large part not be possible without the dedicated community members who care about the Framework and its mission on a...

Metasploit Wrap-Up 12/05/2025

Twonky Auth Bypass, RCEs and RISC-V Reverse Shell Payloads This was another fantastic week in terms of PR contribution to the Metasploit Framework. Rapid7’s very own Ryan Emmons recently disclosed CVE-2025-13315 and CVE-2025-13316 which exist in Twonky Server and allow decrypting admin credential...

Multiple vulnerabilities in Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes

On March 24, 2025, Kubernetes disclosed 5 new vulnerabilities affecting the Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes. Successful exploitation could allow attackers access to all secrets stored across all namespaces in the Kubernetes cluster, which could result in cluster takeover. CVE-2025-1974 9....

CVE-2025-0282: Ivanti Connect Secure Zero-Day Exploited in the Wild

On Wednesday, January 8, 2025, Ivanti disclosed two CVEs affecting Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and Neurons for ZTA gateways. CVE-2025-0282 is a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability that allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute code on the target device. CVE-2025-0283 is ...

Patch Tuesday - December 2024

Microsoft is addressing 70 vulnerabilities this December 2024 Patch Tuesday. Microsoft has evidence of in-the-wild exploitation and public disclosure for one of the vulnerabilities published today, and this is reflected in a CISA KEV entry. For the third month in a row, Microsoft has published...

Multiple Vulnerabilities in Wowza Streaming Engine (Fixed)

Wowza Streaming Engine below v4.9.1 is vulnerable to multiple vulnerabilities on Linux and Windows. An unauthenticated attacker can poison the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager web dashboard with a stored cross-site scripting “XSS” payload. When an administrator views the poisoned dashboard,...