All Posts

2 min Phishing

Detect Unknown Spear Phishing Attacks

Phishing continues to be one of the top attack vectors behind breaches, according to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Sending ten phishing emails to an organization yields a 90% chance that company credentials are compromised. Phishing is often the first step in the attack chain, opening an organization to stealthy credential-based attacks that allow intruders to exfiltrate confidential data. InsightIDR now detects targ

12 min IT Ops

How to Ensure Self Describing Log Data Using Log4Net

In a previous article, The Benefit of Having an Enterprise Logging Policy , I presented the case for always using self-describing data formats when logging information. Using self-describing formats, such as key-value pairs and JSON, saves time and effort in terms of indexing and subsequently querying your logs on the backend. Also, logs that use a self-describing data format are easier to understand by anyone, at any time. In t

1 min InsightIDR

Insight Platform Now Compliant with European Data Hosting Requirement

Cloud technology is everywhere. From our annual survey, we found that 79% of organizations are allowing approved cloud services, with Office 365, Google Apps, and Salesforce coming in as top 3. Our full incident detection & investigation solution, InsightIDR, our incident detection and response solution, and InsightUBA, our user behavior analytics solution are both cloud-based by design, and hosts in the US-based Amazon S3 cloud. Driven by market demand, we now offer a European hosting option to

4 min

Designing Authentication

At Rapid7 security is everything, and that doesn't exclude the UX team. Yes, we want to give you beautiful interactions, seamless workflows and screens that make you go ‘Wow!' But security is always there gently guiding our design decisions, which can sometimes cause conflict between security best practices and the best user experience. Following on from an excellent post from Roy Hodgman , one of the most common examples of the impact of security on user e

2 min Nexpose

Nexpose Content Release Cadence

Over the past year our Nexpose team has taken on the challenge of overhauling our product and internal processes to enable more frequent and seamless content releases. The objective is simple, get customers content to their consoles faster without disrupting their workflow and currently running or scheduled scans. This enables security teams to respond to industry trends much faster and coupled with our new adaptive security feature enables low impact delta scans of just the new or updated vulne

5 min Vulnerability Management

Using the National Vunerability Database to Reveal Vulnerability Trends Over Time

This is a guest post by Ismail Guneydas. Ismail Guneydas is senior technical leader with over ten years of experience in vulnerability management, digital forensics, e-Crime investigations and teaching. Currently he is a senior vulnerability manager at Kimberly-Clark and an adjunct faculty at Texas A&M. He has M.S.  in computer science and MBA degrees. 2015 is in the past, so now is as good a time as any to get some numbers together from the year that was and analyze them.  For this blog post,

8 min IT Ops

Using JavaScript to interact with the REST Query API

We’re very excited to announce that our REST Query API is now available . With this API, you can: * make it easy to remotely query your log data * easily integrate Logentries with third party solutions, external systems and internal tools * allow users and systems to query their log data programmatically over our REST API In this article, I will show how you can quickly interact with the Query API by sending in a LEQL query

3 min IT Ops

How to: Send SMS messages to Logentries in under 5 minutes (maybe 10)

The “Internet Of Things” continues to be talked about a lot with an increasing number of devices now containing some sort of smart functionality which can be interacted with. Here’s a great article about end-to-end IoT monitoring by colleague David Tracey. However, not all IoT devices can be in locations with WiFi or 3/4G coverage, so they can not easily (or at all) send or receive data over the internet, and instead rely on standard cellula

2 min Nexpose

Adaptive Security: Rapid7 Critical Vulnerability Category

Starting this week, we have added a new vulnerability category: Rapid7 Critical. When we examine a typical vulnerability, each vulnerability comes with various pieces of information such as CVE id, CVSS score, and others. These pieces of information can be very handy especially when you set up Automated Actions in Nexpose. Here is an example: As you can see the example on the right, this trigger will initiate a scan action if there is a new coverage available that meets the criteria of CVSS

4 min Komand

What Security Operations Teams Can Learn From Modern Productivity Software

Between your devices, how many apps do you have?The answer for many is dozens, if not hundreds. And many are designed to help us be more efficient: to keep track of growing to do lists, manage complex work tasks, or streamline communication with teams. The trouble is, many of these apps don’t talk to each other very neatly, efficiently, or at all. So it’s no wonder that when the app orchestration solution IFTTT was launched, over one million tasks

2 min Microsoft

On Badlock for Samba (CVE-2016-2118) and Windows (CVE-2016-0128)

Today is Badlock Day You may recall that the folks over at badlock.org stated about 20 days ago that April 12 would see patches for "Badlock," a serious vulnerability in the SMB/CIFS protocol that affects both Microsoft Windows and any server running Samba, an open source workalike for SMB/CIFS services. We talked about it back in our Getting Ahead of Badlock post, and hopefully, IT administrators have taken advantage of the pre-releas

4 min IT Ops

How to Log from Azure Virtual Machines

You have evaluated the many IaaS providers out there and you have decided on Azure Compute .  Great choice! Azure is an ideal provider with broad support for various operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, tools, databases and devices. Azure also has the unique ability to facilitate hybrid deploymen

4 min Komand

The Dangers Of Linear Thinking and Why Security Analysts Should Defend in Graphs

One of my favorite tweets-turned-into blogs of last year was one by Microsoft security’s John Lambert: “Defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs. ” Though it certainly doesn’t entirely sum up the challenges of being a defender, it drummed up some interesting conversation/controversy on twitter. Plus as a nice, pithy statement, it has a good r

15 min IT Ops

How to Compare Google Compute Engine & AWS EC2

Which Virtual Machine is Best: Google’s Compute Engine or Amazon’s EC2? It Depends. The Internet might seem like a Wild West of chaotic connections because it often is. Companies like Google and Amazon have been managing to create order out of the chaos for years by understanding the nature of the World Wide Web. Within the last 10 years, Google and Amazon have leveraged that understanding into a robust suite of product offerings in the field of Infrastructure-as-a- Service, or IaaS. The corn

6 min Government

Vulnerability Disclosure and Handling Surveys - Really, What's the Point?

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I feel like that may well be the thought that a lot of people have when they hear about two surveys posted online this week to investigate perspectives on vulnerability disclosure and handling. Yet despite my natural cynicism, I believe these surveys are a valuable and important step towards understanding the real status quo around vulnerability disclosure and handling so the actions taken to drive adoption of best practices will be more likely to have impact. Hopef