4 min
News
State-Sponsored Threat Actors Target Security Researchers
On Monday, Google’s Threat Analysis Group published a blog on a widespread social engineering campaign that targeted security researchers working on vulnerability research and development.
4 min
Vulnerability Management
May 2020 Cisco Remote Vulnerabilities Guidance
Cisco has posted patches for 34 vulnerabilities on May 6, 2020, with half a dozen that require your immediate attention.
5 min
Research
DOUBLEPULSAR over RDP: Baselining Badness on the Internet
How many internet-accessible RDP services have the DOPU implant installed? How much DOPU-over-RDP traffic do we see being sprayed across the internet?
12 min
Denial of Service (DoS)
How I Shut Down a (Test) Factory with a Single Layer 2 Packet
In this blog, we discuss how a Denial of Service (DoS) bug could crash all Beckhoff PLCs running the Profinet protocol stack if an attacker gains access.
5 min
Cloud Infrastructure
Avoiding the Zombie Cloud Apocalypse: How to Reduce Exposure in the Cloud
In this blog, we share the top cloud configuration mistakes organizations make and four rules to implement so you can migrate securely to the cloud.
3 min
Breach Response News
PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) Compromise: What You Need to Know
According to the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR), a security breach had been found on the `pear.php.net` web server.
4 min
Project Sonar
VPNFilter's Potential Reach — Malware Exposure in SMB/Consumer-grade Devices
(Many thanks to Rebekah Brown [/author/rebekah-brown/] & Derek Abdine for their
contributions to the post.)
How does VPNFilter work?
Over the past few weeks, Cisco’s Talos
[https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/talos.html] group has published
some significant new research
[https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/06/vpnfilter-update.html] on a new
malware family called VPNFilter. VPNFilter targets and compromises networking
devices to monitor the traffic that goes through them. The mal
5 min
Vulnerability Management
Drupalgeddon Vulnerability: What is it? Are You Impacted?
First up: many thanks to Brent Cook [/author/brent-cook/], William Vu
[/author/william-vu/] and Matt Hand for their massive assistance in both the
Rapid7 research into “Drupalgeddon” and their contributions to this post.
Background on the Drupalgeddon vulnerability
The Drupalgeddon 2 vulnerability announcement came out in late March (2018-03-28
) as SA-CORE-2018-002 [https://www.drupal.org/sa-core-2018-002]. The advisory
was released with a patch and CVE (CVE-2018-7600)
[https://www.rapid7.com/
4 min
Research
An Impressively Unprecedented Drop in Open memcached Services
(Many thanks to Jon Hart [https://twitter.com/jhartftw] and Tom Sellers
[https://twitter.com/TomSellers] for their research and content for this blog
post.)
We started performing weekly monitoring of open/amplification-vulnerable
memcached servers after the recent memcrashed
[/2018/02/27/the-flip-side-of-memcrashed/] amplification distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and today we have some truly awesome news to
report, along with some evidence that the recent spate of DDoS attacks may n
8 min
UNITED
Data Mining the Undiscovered Country
Using Internet-scale Research Data to Quantify and Reduce Exposure
It’s been a busy 2017 at Rapid7 Labs. Internet calamity struck swift and often,
keeping us all on our toes and giving us a chance to fully test out the
capabilities of our internet-scale research platform
[https://sonar.labs.rapid7.com/]. Let’s take a look at how two key components of
Rapid7 Labs’ research platform—Project Heisenberg and Heisenberg Cloud—came
together to enumerate and reduce exposure the past two quarters. (If r
2 min
Project Sonar
National Exposure Index 2017
Today, Rapid7 is releasing the second National Exposure Index
[https://www.rapid7.com/info/national-exposure-index], our effort to quantify
the exposure that nations are taking on by offering public services on the
internet—not just the webservers (like the one hosting this blog), but also
unencrypted POP3, IMAPv4, telnet, database servers, SMB, and all the rest. By
mapping the virtual space of the internet to the physical space where the
machines hosting these services reside, we can provide gr
6 min
Research
WannaCry Update: Vulnerable SMB Shares Are Widely Deployed And People Are Scanning For Them (Port 445 Exploit)
WannaCry Overview
Last week the WannaCry ransomware worm, also known as Wanna Decryptor, Wanna
Decryptor 2.0, WNCRY, and WannaCrypt started spreading around the world, holding
computers for ransom at hospitals, government offices, and businesses. To recap:
WannaCry exploits a vulnerability in the Windows Server Message Block (SMB) file
sharing protocol. It spreads to unpatched devices directly connected to the
internet and, once inside an organization, those machines and devices behind the
firew
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
4 min
Honeypots
Apache Struts Vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) Exploit Traffic
UPDATE - March 10th, 2017: Rapid7 added a check that works in conjunction with
Nexpose's web spider functionality. This check will be performed against any
URIs discovered with the suffix “.action” (the default configuration for Apache
Struts apps). To learn more about using this check, read this post
[/2017/03/15/using-web-spider-to-detect-vulnerable-apache-struts-apps-cve-2017-5638]
.
UPDATE - March 9th, 2017: Scan your network for this vulnerability
[https://www.rapid7.com/products/nexpose/d
8 min
Haxmas
12 Days of HaXmas: A HaxMas Carol
(A Story by Rapid7 Labs)
Merry HaXmas to you! Each year we mark the 12 Days of HaXmas [/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.
Happy Holi-data from Rapid7 Labs!
It's been a big year for the Rapid7 elves Labs team. Our nigh 200-node strong
Heisenberg Cloud honeypot network has enabled