Posts by Jon Hart

Attack Surface Monitoring with Project Sonar

Attack Surface Monitoring with Project Sonar can help you reduce and monitor your attack surface.

Understanding Ubiquiti Discovery Service Exposures

On Jan. 29, the Rapid7 Labs team was informed of a tweet by Jim Troutman indicating that Ubiquiti devices were being exploited and used to conduct denial-of-service attacks using a service on 10001/UDP.

6 min Haxmas

Happy HaXmas! Year-End Internet Scanning Observations

As we wrap up 2018 and forge ahead into 2019, let's reflect on some of the key observations we made through our internet scanning with Project Sonar.

13 min Research

Rsunk your Battleship: An Ocean of Data Exposed through Rsync

Rapid7 Labs recently decided to take a fresh look at rsync, this time focusing on exposure of rsync globally on the public internet.

2 min Project Heisenberg

Off the Chain! A Research Paper Observing Bitcoin Nodes on the Public Internet

Over the last several years, blockchain-based technologies have exploded in growth. Lately it seems like blockchains are turning up everywhere, from chicken management systems [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-09/yes-these-chickens-are-on-the-blockchain] to the next hot cryptocurrency [https://medium.com/bitfwd/how-to-do-an-ico-on-ethereum-in-less-than-20-minutes-a0062219374] . Waves of new companies, products and applications exist, often in the form of just wedging a blockcha

7 min Haxmas

Yankee Swapped: MQTT Primer, Exposure, Exploitation, and Exploration

This HaXmas, Rapid7's Jon Hart Yankee swaps readers a few minutes' attention for a festive look at MQTT exposure on the public IPv4 internet (and an exploitation module!).

7 min Research

Cisco Smart Install Exposure

Cisco Smart Install (SMI) provides configuration and image management capabilities for Cisco switches. Cisco’s SMI documentation [http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/smart_install/configuration/guide/smart_install/concepts.html] goes into more detail than we’ll be touching on in this post, but the short version is that SMI leverages a combination of DHCP, TFTP and a proprietary TCP protocol to allow organizations to deploy and manage Cisco switches. Using SMI yields a number of be

11 min Research

Measuring SharknAT&To Exposures

On August 31, 2017, NoMotion’s “SharknAT&To” research [https://www.nomotion.net/blog/sharknatto/] started making the rounds on Twitter. After reading the findings, and noting that some of the characteristics seemed similar to trends we’ve seen in the past, we were eager to gauge the exposure of these vulnerabilities on the public internet. Vulnerabilities [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/vulnerabilities-exploits-threats/] such as default passwords or command injection, which are usually tri

7 min Research

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Exposure

The Remote Desktop Protocol, commonly referred to as RDP, is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft that is used to provide a graphical means of connecting to a network-connected computer. RDP client and server support has been present in varying capacities in most every Windows version since NT [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT]. Outside of Microsoft's offerings, there are RDP clients available for most other operating systems. If the nitty gritty of protocols is your thing, Wiki

1 min Project Sonar

Project Sonar - Mo' Data, Mo' Research

Since its inception, Rapid7's Project Sonar [https://sonar.labs.rapid7.com/] has aimed to share the data and knowledge we've gained from our Internet scanning and collection activities with the larger information security community. Over the years this has resulted in vulnerability disclosures, research papers, conference presentations, community collaboration and data. Lots and lots of data. Thanks to our friends at scans.io [https://scans.io/], Censys [https://censys.io/], and the Universit

3 min Project Sonar

Signal to Noise in Internet Scanning Research

We live in an interesting time for research related to Internet scanning. There is a wealth of data and services to aid in research. Scanning related initiatives like Rapid7's Project Sonar [https://sonar.labs.rapid7.com/], Censys [https://censys.io/], Shodan [https://www.shodan.io/], Shadowserver [https://www.shadowserver.org/] or any number of other public/semi-public projects have been around for years, collecting massive troves of data. The data and services built around it has been used f

3 min Project Sonar

The Internet of Gas Station Tank Gauges -- Final Take?

In early 2015, HD Moore performed one of the first publicly accessible research related to Internet-connected gas station tank gauges, The Internet of Gas Station Tank Gauges [/2015/01/22/the-internet-of-gas-station-tank-gauges]. Later that same year, I did a follow-up study that probed a little deeper in The Internet of Gas Station Tank Gauges — Take #2 [/2015/11/18/the-internet-of-gas-station-tank-gauges-take-2]. As part of that study, we were attempting to see if the exposure of these devic

11 min Metasploit

NCSAM: Understanding UDP Amplification Vulnerabilities Through Rapid7 Research

October is National Cyber Security Awareness month and Rapid7 is taking this time to celebrate security research. This year, NCSAM coincides with new legal protections for security research under the DMCA [/2016/10/03/cybersecurity-awareness-month-2016-this-ones-for-the-researchers] and the 30th anniversary of the CFAA - a problematic law that hinders beneficial security research. Throughout the month, we will be sharing content that enhances understanding of what independent security research

6 min Project Sonar

Sonar NetBIOS Name Service Study

For the past several years, Rapid7's Project Sonar [https://sonar.labs.rapid7.com/] has been performing studies that explore the exposure of the NetBIOS name service on the public IPv4 Internet. This post serves to describe the particulars behind the study and provide tools and data for future research in this area. Protocol Overview Originally conceived in the early 1980s, NetBIOS is a collection of services that allows applications running on different nodes to communicate over a network. O

8 min Vulnerability Management

ScanNow DLL Search Order Hijacking Vulnerability and Deprecation

Overview On November 27, 2015, Stefan Kanthak contacted Rapid7 to report a vulnerability in Rapid7's ScanNow tool. Rapid7 takes security issues seriously and this was no exception. In combination with a preexisting compromise or other vulnerabilities, and in the absence of sufficient mitigating measures, a system with ScanNow can allow a malicious party to execute code of their choosing leading to varying levels of additional compromise. In order to protect the small community of users who ma