Congrats to the Winners of the 2021 Metasploit Community CTF

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Metasploit community CTF! Like last year, this CTF ran over the past 4 days and invited community members to solve a series of challenges. This year saw 1,501 users registered across 727 teams. If you participated in the CTF, we have a feedback...

Kubernetes Guardrails: Bringing DevOps and Security Together on Cloud

Cloud and container technologies are being increasingly embraced by organizations around the globe because of the efficiency, superior visibility, and control they provide to DevOps and IT teams. While DevOps teams see the benefits of cloud and container solutions, these tools create a learning...

InsightCloudSec Supports 12 New AWS Services Announced at re:Invent

In case you didn’t hear, Amazon hosted AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last week. As has come to be expected at the annual mega-event, Amazon made a number of huge announcements and launched a significant number of improvements and brand-new services and settings to enhance their public cloud platform...

Metasploit Wrap-Up

Metasploit CTF 2021 starts today It’s that time of year again! Time for the 2021 Metasploit Community CTF. Earlier today over 1,100 users in more than 530 teams were registered and opened for participation to solve this year’s 18 challenges. Next week a recap and the winners will be announced, so...

Hacky Holidays From Rapid7! Announcing Our New Festive Blog Series

The holiday season often inspires reflection on the year coming to a close — but with the new year approaching, this season can also signal the opportunity for a fresh start. In that spirit, we're announcing a refreshed theme and approach to our annual holiday blog series: Hacky Holidays! While...

OWASP Top 10 Deep Dive: Identification and Authentication Failures

In the 2021 edition of the OWASP top 10 list, Broken Authentication was changed to Identification and Authentication Failures. This term bundles in a number of existing items like cryptography failures, session fixation, default login credentials, and brute-forcing access. Additionally, this...

Ongoing Exploitation of Windows Installer CVE-2021-41379

CVE | Vendor Advisory | AttackerKB | IVM Content | Patching Urgency | Last Update ---|---|---|---|---|--- CVE-2021-41379 | Microsoft Advisory | AttackerKB | Scheduled when patched | ASAP when released | December 3, 2021 3:00 PM ET See the Updates section at the end of this post for new informatio...

Active Exploitation of Apache HTTP Server CVE-2021-40438

CVE | Vendor Advisory | AttackerKB | IVM Content | Patching Urgency | Last Update ---|---|---|---|---|--- CVE-2021-40438 | Apache Advisory | AttackerKB | 09/16/2021 multiple | ASAP | December 1, 2021 14:00 ET On September 16, 2021, Apache released version 2.4.49 of HTTP Server, which included a f...

Metasploit Wrap-Up

Self-Service Remote Code Execution This week, our own @wvu-r7 added an exploit module that achieves unauthenticated remote code execution in ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus, a self-service password management and single sign-on solution for Active Directory. This new module leverages a REST API...

[Security Nation] Chris John Riley on Minimum Viable Secure Product (MVSP)

!\Security Nation\ Chris John Riley on Minimum Viable Secure Product \MVSP\https://blog.rapid7.com/content/images/2021/11/securitynationlogo--1--2.jpg In the final installment of Season 4 of Security Nation, Jen and Tod sit down with Chris John Riley, senior security engineer at Google and co-hos...

OWASP Top 10 Deep Dive: Defending Against Server-Side Request Forgery

Web applications are no longer just assets to a company — they’re an organization’s identity, playing a major role in how customers, clients, and users see a brand. Due to this importance, web apps have also become a primary target for attack. Over the years, these applications have grown more...

The End of the Cybersecurity Skills Crisis (Maybe?)

In just 4 years, you can learn to be fluent in Mandarin. In 2 years, NASA can get you through astronaut training. But the cybersecurity skills gap? It's dire and dead-stuck in its fifth straight year of zero progress. Globally, 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs remain unfilled, and of those candidat...

Metasploit Wrap-Up

Azure Active Directory login scanner module Community contributor k0pak4 added a new login scanner module for Azure Active Directory. This module exploits a vulnerable authentication endpoint in order to enumerate usernames without generating log events. The error code returned by the endpoint ca...

2022 Planning: A First-Year CISO Shares Her Point of View

When you're planning for the year ahead in cybersecurity, there's always part of you that's trying to play fortune-teller. You know what risks matter now, and the processes and resources you need to respond to them, but what threats might emerge over the coming 12 months — or 12 weeks, for that...

Make Room for Cloud Security in Your 2022 Budget

Are you thinking about cloud security when making your 2022 budget? You should be. Cloud is the key to innovation and business transformation. It can make life so much easier. The cloud enables companies to expand their products or services, rapidly develop new products, and reach new customers. ...

Distribute Reports to Email Addresses in InsightVM

Rapid7 is investing heavily in the reporting and dashboard capabilities of InsightVM. In 2021 alone, we launched the ability to filter dashboards via single query, a new report creation wizard powered by our query builder, several use-case-driven dashboard templates, and most recently, the abilit...

2022 Planning: Prioritizing Defense and Mitigation Through Left of Boom

In the military, the term “left of boom" refers to the strategy and tactics required to prevent — and protect personnel from — explosions by making proactive decisions before the event happens. Unless you've been fortunate enough to avoid tech and media press for the past 24 months, it should be...

Announcing the 2021 Metasploit Community CTF

It’s time for another Metasploit community CTF! Last year’s beginner-friendly CTF attracted a wider range of audiences and skill levels than in previous years, so we’re replicating our previous game architecture. Players will attack a single Linux target, we’ve spread prizes out across 15 teams,...

Thawing Out the Chilling Effect Of DMCA Section 1201

The Copyright Office has issued the latest rules on exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA. Great news: Legal protections for independent security research have once again been meaningfully strengthened. On the whole, these protections are now significantly greate...

Better Together: XDR, SOAR, Vulnerability Management, and External Threat Intelligence

One of the biggest challenges with both incident response and vulnerability management is not just the raw number of incidents and vulnerabilities organizations need to triage and manage, but the fact that it's often difficult to separate the critical incidents and vulnerabilities from the minor...

Metasploit Wrap-Up

Callback Hell Metasploit has now added an exploit module for CVE-2021-40449, a Windows local privilege escalation exploit caused by a use-after-free during the NtGdiResetDC callback in vulnerable versions of win32k.sys. This module can be used to escalate privileges to those of NT AUTHORITY\SYSTE...

Hands-On IoT Hacking: Rapid7 at DefCon 29 IoT Village, Part 4

The first 3 installments of our series on Rapid7's hands-on exercise from the IoT Village at this year's DefCon covered how to set up a UART header, how to determine UART status and baud rate, and how to log into single-user mode on the device. In this final post, we'll discuss how to gain full...

Time to Act: Bridging the Gap in Cloud Automation Adoption

Ready or not, the cloud is here. Across the board, an overwhelming majority of organizations recognize the value of the cloud. According to a recent survey conducted by Rapid7, 90% of respondents believe that cloud operations are critical to the competitiveness of their business. Analysts agree —...

Update to GLBA Security Requirements for Financial Institutions

Heads up financial institutions: the Federal Trade Commission FTC announced the first cybersecurity updates to the Gramm Leach-Bliley Act GLBA Safeguards Rule since 2003. The new rule strengthens the required security safeguards for customer information. This includes formal risk assessments,...

[Security Nation] Michael Powell on Being a Cyber Envoy

!\Security Nation\ Michael Powell on Being a Cyber Envoyhttps://blog.rapid7.com/content/images/2021/11/securitynationlogo--1--1.jpg In this episode of Security Nation, Jen and Tod chat with Michael Powell about his work as specialist cyber representative to North America for the UK's Department f...

CVE-2021-43287 Allows Pre-Authenticated Build Takeover of GoCD Pipelines

On October 26, 2021, open-source CI/CD solution GoCD released version 21.3.0, which included a fix for CVE-2021-43287, a critical information disclosure vulnerability whose exploitation allows unauthenticated attackers to leak configuration information, including build secrets and encryption keys...

tCell by Rapid7 Supports the Newly Released .NET 6.0

We’re excited to share that we've coordinated our recent .NET and .NET Core agent releases with the brand new .NET 6.0 release from Microsoft. What is tCell? Since the founding of tCell by Rapid7, our web application and API protection solution, we’ve prided ourselves on providing both breadth an...

Opportunistic Exploitation of Zoho ManageEngine and Sitecore CVEs

Over the weekend of November 6, 2021, Rapid7’s Incident Response IR and Managed Detection and Response MDR teams began seeing opportunistic exploitation of two unrelated CVEs: CVE-2021-40539, a REST API authentication bypass in Zoho’s ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus product that Rapid7 has...

InsightIDR Was XDR Before XDR Was Even a Thing: An Origin Story

An origin story explains who you are and why. Spiderman has one. So do you. Rapid7 began building InsightIDR in 2013. It was the year Yahoo’s epic data breach exposed the names, dates of birth, passwords, and security questions and answers of 3 billion users. Back then, security professionals...

OWASP Top 10 Deep Dive: Getting a Clear View on Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Most of us think of climbing the ladder as a good thing — but when the ladder in question is OWASP's Top 10 list of application security risks, a sudden upward trajectory is cause for alarm rather than encouragement. In the 2021 edition of the OWASP list, vulnerable and outdated components moved ...

Metasploit Wrap-Up

GitLab RCE New Rapid7 team member jbaines-r7 wrote an exploit targeting GitLab via the ExifTool command. Exploiting this vulnerability results in unauthenticated remote code execution as the git user. What makes this module extra neat is the fact that it chains two vulnerabilities together to...

New NPM library hijacks (coa and rc)

On Thursday, November 4, 2021, barely more than a week after ua-parser-js was hijacked, another popular NPM library called coa Command-Option-Argument, which is used in React packages around the world, was hijacked to distribute credential-stealing malware. The developer community noticed somethi...

2022 Planning: The Path to Effective Cybersecurity Maturity

When it comes to bringing cyber safety and resilience to all parts of your organization, there is no silver bullet. Achieving cybersecurity maturity isn't something you can do overnight — it requires a significant amount of planning, prioritizing, and coordinating across the business. While this...

Trojan Source CVE-2021-42572: No Panic Necessary

What is this thing? Researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh recently published a paper on an attack technique they call “Trojan Source.” The attack targets a weakness in text-encoding standard Unicode—which allows computers to handle text across many different...

Hands-On IoT Hacking: Rapid7 at DefCon 29 IoT Village, Part 3

In our first post in this series, we covered the setup of Rapid7's hands-on exercise at Defcon 29's IoT Village. Last week, we discussed how to determine the UART status of the header we created and how to actually start hacking on the IoT device. The goal in this next phase of the IoT hacking...

[Security Nation] Pete Cooper and Irene Pontisso of the UK Cabinet Office on Their Cybersecurity Culture Competition

!\Security Nation\ Pete Cooper and Irene Pontisso of the UK Cabinet Office on Their Cybersecurity Culture Competitionhttps://blog.rapid7.com/content/images/2021/11/securitynationlogo--1-.jpg In this special bonus episode of Security Nation, Jen and Tod chat with Pete Cooper and Irene Pontisso fro...

Building Threat-Informed Defenses: Rapid7 Experts Share Their Thoughts on MITRE ATT&CK

MITRE ATT&CK is considered by practitioners and the analyst community to be the most comprehensive framework of cybersecurity attacks and mitigation techniques available today. MITRE helps the security industry speak the same language and stick to a well-known, common framework. To get more detai...

InsightVM Scan Diagnostics: Troubleshooting Credential Issues for Authenticated Scanning

Have you ever tried to figure out why a vulnerability or policy scan isn’t showing you the results you expect, even though you’ve provided credentials? If so, you’ll be pleased to hear that the November 3rd release of Nexpose and InsightVM version 6.6.112 will introduce a new check category...

A Matter of Perspective: Agent-Based and Agentless Approaches to Cloud Security, Part 2

In our previous blog on this topic, we discussed some of the considerations when choosing between agent-based and agentless cloud security approaches. The following table provides a summary of these considerations. Aspect | Agent-based | Agentless ---|---|--- Deployment | - Deployed on every asse...

Solving the Access Goldilocks Problem: RBAC for InsightAppSec Is Here

We're all familiar with the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks starts a new job as a security specialist on the security team at Three Bears' Porridge, Inc. and is given access to their application security platform. At first, the access she's given is far too broad. It causes...

GitLab Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution CVE-2021-22205 Exploited in the Wild

CVE | Vendor Advisory | AttackerKB | IVM Content | Patching Urgency | Last Update ---|---|---|---|---|--- CVE-2021-22205 | GitLab Advisory | AttackerKB | Evaluating | ASAP | November 1, 2021 On April 14, 2021, GitLab published a security release to address CVE-2021-22205, a critical remote code...

Metasploit Wrap-Up

OMIGOD It's RCE We are excited to announce that we now have a module for the OMIGOD vulnerability that exploits CVE-2021-38647 courtesy of our very own Spencer McIntyre! Successful exploitation will allow an unauthenticated attacker to gain root level code execution against affected servers. Give...

2022 Planning: Straight Talk on Zero Trust

“Zero trust" is increasingly being heralded as the ultimate solution for organizational cyber safety and resilience — but what does it really mean, and how can you assess if it has a practical place in your organization's cybersecurity strategy for 2022? In this post, we'll answer those questions...

Sneaking Through Windows: Infostealer Malware Masquerades as Windows Application

This post also includes contributions from Reese Lewis, Andrew Christian, and Seth Lazarus. Rapid7's Managed Detection and Response MDR team leverages specialized toolsets, malware analysis, tradecraft, and collaboration with our colleagues on the Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering TID...

Hands-On IoT Hacking: Rapid7 at DefCon IoT Village, Part 2

In our last post, we discussed how we set up Rapid7's hands-on exercise at the Defcon 29 IoT Village. Now, with that foundation laid, we'll get into how to determine whether the header we created is UART. When trying to determine baud rate for IoT devices, I often just guess. Generally, for typic...

[Security Nation] Jack Cable on Ransomwhere

!\Security Nation\ Jack Cable on Ransomwherehttps://blog.rapid7.com/content/images/2021/10/securitynationlogo--1-.jpg In this episode of Security Nation, Jen and Tod chat with Jack Cable, security architect at the Krebs Stamos Group, about Ransomwhere, a crowdsourced ransomware payment tracker...

Automation Enables Innovation in the Cloud

As public cloud adoption continues to grow year after year, we see more and more enterprises realizing the strategic advantage the cloud can provide to help deliver new and innovative products quicker, roll out new features with ease, and reach new customers. But along with those advantages comes...

Securely Advancing in the Sunshine State: Rapid7 Announces Tampa Office Opening

In our quest to create a safer digital world for all, Rapid7 is also on a mission to reimagine the future of work, culture, and talent — admittedly, we've set the bar pretty high for ourselves. But that's part of the spirit of Never Done, one of our core values. We're always striving to do better...

NPM Library (ua-parser-js) Hijacked: What You Need to Know

Last Update: October 27, 2021 For approximately 4 hours on Friday, October 22, 2021, a widely utilized NPM package, ua-parser-js, was embedded with a malicious script intended to install a coinminer and harvest user/credential information. This package is used “to detect Browser, Engine, OS, CPU,...

Recog: Data Rules Everything Around Me

The recog project — a recognition framework used to identify products, operating systems, and hardware through matching network probe data against its extensive fingerprint collection — has been around for many years. In the beginning, Rapid7 used it internally as part of the Nexpose vulnerabilit...