Posts by Deral Heiland

4 min Penetration Testing

IoT Security Testing Methodology

By Deral Heiland IoT - IoT Research Lead Rapid7 Nathan Sevier - Senior Consultant Rapid7 Chris Littlebury - Threat Assessment Manage Rapid7 End-to-end ecosystem methodology When examining IoT technology, the actionable testing focus and methodology is often applied solely to the embedded device. This is short sighted and incomplete. An effective assessment methodology should consider the entire IoT solution or as we refer to it, the IoT Product Ecosystem. Every interactive component that makes

6 min IoT

12 Days of HaXmas: 2016 IoT Research Recap

Merry HaXmas to you! Each year we mark the 12 Days of HaXmas [https://www.rapid7.com/blog/tag/haxmas/] with 12 blog posts on hacking-related topics and roundups from the year. This year, we're highlighting some of the “gifts” we want to give back to the community. And while these gifts may not come wrapped with a bow, we hope you enjoy them. As we close out the end of the year, I find it important to reflect on the IoT vulnerability research conducted during 2016 and what we learned from it. Th

3 min IoT

IoT Security vs Usability

Recently we all have found ourselves talking about the risk and impact of poorly secured IoT technology and who is responsible. Fact is there is enough blame to go around for everyone, but let's not go there. Let us start focusing on solutions that can help secure IoT technology. Usability has been an issue that has plagued us since the beginning of time. As an example, just going back to my youth and seeing my parents VCR flashing 12:00 all the time. We laugh at that, because it showed us thei

2 min IoT

Research Lead (IoT)

It has been an amazing journey serving as the Research Lead for the Internet of Things (IoT) at Rapid7 for past 10 months. I came into the role with more than a decade of experience as a security penetration tester and nearly 15 years of experience conducting security research across such areas as protocol based attacks, embedded device exploitation, and web vulnerabilities, so taking on the role, as Research Lead for IoT was the next obvious progression for me. Being able to focus on IoT specif

7 min IoT

Getting a Handle on the [Internet of] Things in the Enterprise

This blog post was written by Bob Rudis, Chief Security Data Scientist and Deral Heiland, Research Lead. Organizations have been participating in the “Internet of Things” (IoT) for years, long before marketers put this new three-letter acronym together. HVAC monitoring/control, badge access, video surveillance systems and more all have had IP connectivity for ages. Today, more systems, processes and (for lack of a more precise word) gizmos are being connected to enterprise networks that fit int

5 min Penetration Testing

SNMP Data Harvesting During Penetration Testing

A few months back I posted a blog entry, SNMP Best Practices [/2016/01/27/simple-network-management-protocol-snmp-best-practices], to give guidance on best methods to reduce security risks as they relate to SNMP. Now that everyone has had time to fix all those issues, I figured it's time to give some guidance to penetration testers and consultants on how to exploit exposed SNMP services by harvesting data and using it to expand their attack footprint. The first question when approaching SNMP is

4 min Authentication

Brute Force Attacks Using US Census Bureau Data

Currently one of the most successful methods for compromising an organization is via password-guessing attacks. To gain access to an organization using brute force attack [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/brute-force-and-dictionary-attacks/] methods, there are a minimum of three things a malicious actor needs: A username, a password, and a target. Often the targets are easy to discover, and typically turn out to be email systems such as Outlook Web Access (OWA) or VPN solutions that are expo

6 min IoT

Smile! You're on Candid APT

Recently IP camera hacking has taken front stage in the news [http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/how-to-search-the-internet-of-things-for-photos-of-sleeping-babies/] . Actually, hacking IP cameras is not all that new—it's been around for a number of years—but historically the focus has been related to gaining access to just the video portion of the camera. But with IP cameras being one of the many IoT technologies out there often found to be improperly secured, I figured it was time to look

3 min Authentication

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Best Practices

By Deral Heiland, Research Lead, and Brian Tant, Senior Consultant, of Rapid7 Global Services Over the past several years while conducting security research in the area of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and presenting those findings at conferences around the world we are constantly approached with the same question: “What are the best practices for securing SNMP”? The first thing to remember about SNMP versions 1, 2, and 2c is that the community strings used for authentication are c

10 min Haxmas

12 Days of HaXmas: Advanced Persistent Printer

This post is the second in the series, "The 12 Days of HaXmas." By Deral Heiland, Principal Consultant, and Nate Power, Senior Consultant, of Rapid7 Global Services Year after year we have been discussing the risk of Multi-Function Printers (MFP) in the corporate environment and how a malicious actor can easily leverage these devices to carry out attacks, including extraction of Windows Active Directory credentials via LDAP and abusing the "Scan to File" and "Scan to E-mail" features. To take

5 min Vulnerability Disclosure

R7-2014-01, R7-2014-02, R7-2014-03 Disclosures: Exposure of Critical Information Via SNMP Public Community String

Summary of Vulnerabilities This report details three critical information disclosure vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities were discovered while Matthew Kienow and I (Deral Heiland [https://twitter.com/percent_x]) were researching information disclosure issues in SNMP on embedded appliances for a talk [http://carolinacon.org/abstracts.html#6] at CarolinaCon [http://carolinacon.org/index.html]. During this research project, most devices exposed information that would be classified as benign or pub