Posts by John Schimelpfenig

1 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 11.7.14 - Up in the Clouds...

Happy Friday, Federal friends! I hope everyone had a festive Halloween! According to the commercials I've been seeing on starting on 11/1 I guess we're skipping Thanksgiving this year and jumping right into the Holiday Season [http://www.idigitaltimes.com/black-friday-sales-2014-store-hours-and-start-time-target-walmart-best-buy-kmart-393775] ... So the time has finally come, Fed is starting to embrace the cloud (slowly). Within the last week we've seen NIST push out a road map for Cloud Infra

3 min

Mo Monday's at Rapid7 - Movember Week 1

Okay, okay... technically it's Tuesday. We had a few member's of our Herd out of the office yesterday which delayed the debut of the facial follicle fortitude that is needed to join the Rapid7 Moosestaches for Movember. Movember, for those of you who don't know, is a month long mustache growing campaign to raise awareness for men's health. While we're all guaranteed to look ridiculous, some will be downright creepy, we are doing it for a cause. There are 19 of the Rapid7 Moose signed up this yea

3 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 10.24.14 - NCSAM Week 4

Happy Friday, Federal friends! Can anyone else believe next week is Halloween? Feels like only yesterday I was talking about the start of the MLB season and now we're through 2 games of the World Series... So this week is the 4th week of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month [http://www.dhs.gov/national-cyber-security-awareness-month-2014-week-four]. To me this is one of the more important weeks as the campaign centers around Cybersecurity for Small/Medium sized businesses and Entrepreneurs. T

2 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 10.17.14 - Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Happy Friday, Federal friends. I hope the 2nd full week of FY15 is going well for you. Feels like we have the last 2 warm days of the year coming up this weekend thanks in part to this little graphic from NOAA. October, one of the nicer month's out of the year is also known as Cybersecurity Awareness month. We talked about it earlier this month in another blog post [/2014/10/06/cyber-security-awareness-month-taking-it-to-the-c-level-and-beyond] , but I wanted to highlight it here as well. While

1 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 10.3.14 - Happy (Fiscal) New Year

Happy Friday, Federal Friends! Something seems a little different this year than last year, can't quite put my finger on it though... [/2013/10/04/federal-friday--10413--shutdown-edition] So, being that we all just made it through another roller coaster of a FY I wanted to keep today fairly light. Just as we've seen the frequency of attacks increase we have also seen a dramatic rise in cyber related plot lines and references in mainstream media. The latest being a CBS show called Scorpion, ahem

1 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 9.26.14 - Shell Shocked and Bashed

Happy Friday, Federal Friends! Having a relatively quiet week? Just looking forward to a quiet end to FY14? Riiiiiiiiight, same here.... Most of you probably had an interesting 2nd half of the week just as we are. Like a judge at the Olympics, DHS [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/new-bash-software-bug-m_n_5878398.html?ir=Technology] has scored this little diddy a 10 out of 10 both in impact and how easy it is to use this vuln to run an exploit. While this doesn't have the "world-is-end

2 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 9.19.14 - Talk Like A Pirate Day Edition

Arrrrrg! Happy Friday, Federal Mateys!  Th' air be crisp 'n th' leaves be turnin' in New England, which means ‘tis almost the hour to strap on me skis! Another week has gone by 'n another breach be bein' reported by FireEye [http://www.fireeye.com/blog/technical/2014/09/putting-transcom-in-perspective.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SecurityBloggersNetwork+%28Security+Bloggers+Network%29] . Arrrgh mateys, 'tis one involves a foreign government penetratin' th' net

1 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 8.22.14 - A Sensitive Cloud and Some Additional Strategy

Happy Friday, Federal Friends! Do you hear that? That sound you're hearing is the collective high-five every adult with children just gave each other in celebration of "Back to School [http://giphy.com/gifs/WKdPOVCG5LPaM]." For those of you who's summah is coming to a close, I hope it has been a great couple of months. For those of you that don't have to worry about that, I'll see ya at the empty beach in September. I read a great article this week about another take on cyber strategy. Piggy--b

1 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 7.11.14 - Buying Agile

Happy Friday, Federal friends! Due to the heavy amount of CDM paperwork I've had to do this week I'm going to keep today's blog very short. As we forge ahead into the spending spree [http://fcw.com/articles/2014/07/11/snapshot-fy-2014-q4-spending.aspx] that is Q4 of FY14, it's important to know how to navigate the buying process on the federal side of the house. FCW has a great article [http://fcw.com/articles/2014/06/26/buying-agile-without-jumping-through-hoops.aspx] this week offering a hos

3 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 6.27.14 - A Clash of Cultures

Happy Friday, Federal Friends! Welcome to the weekend, and for those of you who are out next week, happy Fourth of July. There was a great, short, read from the Washington Post [http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-it/cias-cio-working-with-private-sector-can-be-a-clash-of-cultures/2014/06/24/42213114-fbad-11e3-b1f4-8e77c632c07b_story.html] this week about a talk given given by CIA CIO Doug Wolfe at a recent symposium. He was talking about the Agency's coming deployment into AWS but went i

2 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 6.20.14 - Winter is Coming

Happy Friday, Federal friends. The World Cup (soccer tournament) is underway, and while futbol is fun to watch for a few weeks, we are really waiting for the start of football training camp. Sorry about the title, especially for those in the Northeast. It's more of a play on Game of Thrones ominous tag line, and about how one should be prepared. In this case I'm using it in reference to the pending changes coming to NIST 800-53 [http://www.informationweek.com/government/cybersecurity/nist-secur

2 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 6.13.14 - New Group, Same Story

Happy Friday, Federal friends! It's another lovely Fall day here in Beantown but I hope each of you are enjoying your early Summer weather. Some exciting news as Rapid7 was named one of the Top Places to Work by the Boston Business Journal (#11 Mid-size company)! I'm going to keep it short and sweet today considering this is a topic I've covered before. Given the news stemming from a new CrowdStrike [http://www.crowdstrike.com/sites/all/themes/crowdstrike2/css/imgs/platform/CrowdStrike_Global_T

1 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 5.30.14 - Social Engineering from the Middle East

Happy Friday, Federal friends. You can tell it's almost Summah up here because it's been 50 and raining this week. So an interesting piece of news from an article on DarkReading [http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/iranian-cyberspies-pose-as-journalists-online-to-ensnare-their-targets/d/d-id/1269270] this week regarding an ongoing campaign targeting government officials and contractors of both the US and Israel. This is a mash-up of social engineering techniques from phishing to social

2 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 5.16.14 - Cloudy with a Chance of Insider Threats

To quote the multi-dimensional, world-renowned lyricist Rebecca Black: "Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday. Today i-is Friday, Friday." With that being said -- welcome to the weekend, Federal friends. I wanted to start this week off with an article from GCN [http://gcn.com/articles/2014/05/09/insight-hybrid-cloud-security.aspx?admgarea=TC_SecCybersSec] around government and the cloud. While the cloud trend has steadily increased over the past few years, the demand to bring it on board within the

2 min Metasploit

Federal Friday - 4.25.14 - A Whole Lot of Oops

Happy Friday, Federal friends! I hope all of you enjoyed some nice family time over the respective holidays last week. After a successful Marathon Monday here in Boston we're blessed with chirping birds and blooming flowers (finally)! As you all probably know by now, Verizon released their latest DBIR [http://www.verizonenterprise.com/DBIR/2014/reports/rp_dbir-2014-executive-summary_en_xg.pdf] report earlier this week. While this report covered a wide range of topics in regards to breaches, I