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3 min Metasploit

Good-bye msfpayload and msfencode

Greetings all, On behalf of the Metasploit's development teams, I'd like to officially announce the decision of deprecating msfpayload and msfencode. Also starting today, we no longer support or accept patches for these two utilities. On June 8th 2015, the elderly msfpayload and msfencode will retire from the Metasploit repository, and replaced by their successor msfvenom. The tool msfvenom is the combination of msfpayload and msfencode, and has been in testing for more than 3.5 years. msfpayl

3 min IT Ops

Community Packs for AWS: Out of the Box Dashboards, Alerts, & Queries

We recently released Logentries Community Packs , dynamic JSON files that (when uploaded into Logentries ) automatically create Saved queries, Dashboards and Alerts. The true power of these packs is that anyone can create, modify and share them. We called them Community Packs because we want to offer different Communities a “pack” of log analysis features customized for their specifi

5 min IT Ops

Keepalived and HAProxy in AWS: An Exploratory Guide

We’re going to explore high availability and load balancing using Keepalived and HAProxy . Keepalived is a routing software designed to provide simple and robust facilities for load balancing and high-availability to Linux systems and Linux-based infrastructures. HAProxy is an open source load balancer/reverse proxy generally used for load balancing web services, but also has the functionality to load balance TCP traffic. Together, Keepali

6 min IT Ops

ES6: Javascript in Harmony: An Overview of New Language Features

ECMAScript 6 brings powerful new capabilities and some tasty syntactical sugar to the ubiquitous Javascript language, as it continues to grab an ever increasing slice of developer mindshare. Now that the ES6 feature set is frozen and just minor refinements will be made over the coming months, much of this new functionality has already landed in modern browsers, and will continue to roll out with each new browser update. For the impatient, there are also now several excellent precompile / polyf

3 min Authentication

Patch CVE-2014-6324 To Avoid A Complete Domain Rebuild When UserInsight Detects Its Exploit

On Tuesday, November 18th, Microsoft released an out-of-band security patch affecting any Windows domain controllers that are not running in Azure. I have not yet seen any cute graphics or buzzword names for it, so it will likely be known as MS14-068, CVE-2014-6324, or "that Kerberos vulnerability that is being exploited in the wild to completely take over Windows domains" because it rolls off the tongue a little better. There is a very informative description of the vulnerability, impact, and

5 min Antivirus

Finding and Protecting mission-critical assets with ControlsInsight

ControlsInsight helps organizations measure how well critical security controls are deployed and configured throughout the enterprise.   Yet, as hard you may try, it's extremely difficult to protect every asset on your network perfectly, and it's often necessary to prioritize "misson-critical" assets that store important or sensitive business data. Clearly, securing the laptop computer of Sally, the chief financial officer, is much more important than securing Joe the intern's laptop, which prob

3 min IT Ops

How to Implement JSON Formatting of IIS for Analytics and Troubleshooting

Previously, we wrote about setting up a Windows environment to log JSON formatted logs using our Windows Agent or our DataHub.  Now we’ll tackle IIS . IIS, like Windows, has a unique log format that makes it difficult to read, parse, and garner useful information.  The log is a flat file that has a line-per-web hit; similar to Apache or Nginx. But, it’s not as easy to format intoJSON as Apache and Nginix

4 min IT Ops

For the Love of Code: Why We Use JSHint for Static Code Analysis

As developers, we all strive for clean, readable, and easy to refactor code; but, unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. No matter how great a developer you are, or what language you’re coding in; problems caused by bugs inevitably spring up like weeds in the grass. These problems are exasperated by poorly organized and poorly written code. Once quality starts to drop, even the cleanest high-quality code in your project begins to be affected, until you’re left with a jumbled mess of (and ha

5 min Metasploit

R7-2014-18: Hikvision DVR Devices - Multiple Vulnerabilities

Rapid7 Labs has found multiple vulnerabilities in Hikvision DVR (Digital Video Recorder) devices such as the DS-7204 and other models in the same product series that allow a remote attacker to gain full control of the device. More specifically, three typical buffer overflow vulnerabilities were discovered in Hikvision's RTSP request handling code: CVE-2014-4878, CVE-2014-4879 and CVE-2014-4880. This blog post serves as disclosure of the technical details for th

2 min Nexpose

Why that CVSS score? HTTP TRACE vulnerability-your questions answered

Recently we saw that there were some questions on Twitter about the HTTP TRACE vulnerability check in Nexpose, specifically around the CVSS score.  Thank you @digininja , @tautology0 , and @raesene for raising this issue - we love to hear from our users and appreciate honest feedback on our solutions. Questions like these cause us to challenge our own assumptions and reasoning, which is always a healthy pr

1 min Patch Tuesday

Patch Tuesday, November 2014

Patch Tuesday came in hot this month with 15 advisories, of which 4 are listed as critical.  Hate to point it out, but this was originally advertised as 16 with 5 critical, but the patch for MS14-068 apparently isn't ready for prime time yet.  Hopefully the decision to hold it back was based on both the testing and an assessment of risk. The top patching priority is definitely going to be MS14-064, which is under active exploitation in the wild and may be related, at least superficially, to las

2 min Nexpose

Nexpose API: SiteSaveRequest and IP Addresses vs Host Names

With the release of Nexpose 5.11.1 we made some changes under the hood that improved scan performance and scan integration performance. As a result of those changes, the rules applied to using SiteSaveRequest in API 1.1 became stricter, which may have caused issues for some users. In the past this "worked" for the most part, though there were certainly side effects observable in the Web interface after the fact. Since these issues were not a

2 min Patch Tuesday

SChannel and MS14-066, another Red Alert?

This has been a busy Patch Tuesday for Microsoft. Of the fourteen bulletins, four of which were deemed critical, MS14-066 has been getting significant attention. This vulnerability, CVE-2014-6321 , affects Windows Secure Channel (SChannel) and was discovered privately by Microsoft through an in

3 min IT Ops

JSON Formatting of Windows Events: It's Hot!

It seems like everyone in DevOps has been talking about JSON recently – JSON is hot! Logentries has written a few posts covering this topic, coveringWhat is JSON , Common Problems Solved with JSON , and our Exporting as JSON . However we thought it would be beneficial to dive into some more specific applications. We already wrote about a few, namely JSON a

3 min Cloud Infrastructure

Securing the Shadow IT: How to Enable Secure Cloud Services for Your Business

You may fear that cloud services jeopardize your organization's security. Yet, your business relies on cloud services to increase its productivity. Introducing a policy to forbid these cloud services may not be a viable option. The better option is to get visibility into your shadow IT and to enable your business to use it securely to increase productivity and keep up with the market. Step one: Find out which cloud services your organization is u