All Posts

2 min Vulnerability Disclosure

UserInsight Gets the All-Clear for ShellShock and Helps Detect Attackers on Your Network

If you're in security, you've likely already heard about the ShellShock vulnerability (aka Bash Bug, CVE-2014-6271, and CVE-204-7169). We have reviewed how ShellShock is being exploited, and the disclosed vectors are not applicable to our UserInsight deployment, yet we're following the security community's lead around patching all of our systems. In case other systems on your network have been compromised, you should be extra vigilant about suspicio

3 min Vulnerability Disclosure

Bash the bash bug: Here's how to scan for CVE-2014-6271 (Shellshock)

__ A severe vulnerability was disclosed in bash that is present on most Linux, BSD, and Unix-like systems, including Mac OS X. The basis of this vulnerability (nicknamed Shellshock) is that bash does not stop processing after the function definition, leaving it vulnerable to malicious functions containing trailing commands. Common Vulnerabilities and Exp

5 min API

Working with reports and exports via the RPC API

The Metasploit RPC API provides a straightforward, programmatic way to accomplish basic tasks with your Metasploit Pro instance. Two of the key capabilities are export generation to backup your data and report generation to summarize and share your findings. The RPC API docs are currently undergoing a major overhaul and are a bit out of date for reports and export generation. This post will provide all the examples and configuration options you need to get running. Setting up a client to make t

5 min IT Ops

Cloud Platforms vs. On-Prem - A Guide for the Rest of Us

Working for Cloud based businesses for the greater part of a decade now, one question invariably comes up: “Why should I move my data to the cloud?” There are always a few objections that come up as well. Following-up on a previous blog post where we discussed the business benefits of cloud computing , this will be a discussion on the most common objections and how to have a conversation around cloud and on-premise envir

1 min Metasploit

New "show missing" Command in msfconsole

Hello, Metasploiters! Just wanted to update y'all on a new feature in msfconsole that *hopefully* should make vgrepping through module options a little easier. Show empty required options The new command is show missing, and all it does is show empty required options. Instead of looking through a long list of options and picking out the required ones that haven't been set, just run show missing, and a list of unset required

2 min IT Ops

E2N Reduces Anxiety and Increases Customer Satisfaction with Log Data

E2NGastro is a small startup in Germany, who provide a SaaS platform for restaurant management, staff management, timekeeping, and work schedules (among other services). We spoke with their CEO/CTO, Bjorn Raupach, who shared the history behind their use of log data. Before using a log management tool , E2N had log files, but they were difficult to locate. To access them, you had

4 min IT Ops

3 Common Problems Solved With JSON

One of the most common questions we get asked by customers is: “What’s the best way to log my data?” My answer is always: “log using JSON format wherever possible.” The next question we often get asked – (but not as much)… Yeah JSON, …Hmmm, what is JSON again? So JSON is:JavaScriptObjectNotation. But put simply, this is a way that data can be stored in a structured format, where each piece of data will usually have an identifier (known as a key) and a value (which can be in multiple forma

4 min IT Ops

7 Benefits of Cloud Computing for Non-Technical Techies

Much has been written about the cloud. What it is , where it is , how it works , etc. This isn’t going to be a rehash of those questions. This is a cloud computing guide for the non-developer or non-operations guy. The goal of this post is to lay the groundwork for a further discussion: of cloud vs. on-premise, an

2 min

HacmeBank & HacmeCasino in the Cloud | Free Windows Security Trainings

After Metasploitable in the Cloud and bWAPP , CTF365 has increase both, the number of "vulnerable by design" servers and operating systems by adding HacmeBank and HacmeCasino as vulnerable web applications courtesy to McAfee through Fundstone. The machines runs on Windows Server 2008 and WindowXP thanks to Microsoft through their Bizspark Startup Program and they are acces

1 min Windows

Mitigating Service Account Credential Theft

I am excited to announce a new whitepaper, Mitigating Service Account Credential Theft on Windows. This paper was a collaboration between myself, Joe Bialek of Microsoft, and Ashwath Murthy of Palo Alto Networks. The executive summary is shown below, Over the last 15 years, the Microsoft Windows ecosystem has expanded with the meteoric rise of the internet, business technology, and computing in gene

2 min Incident Response

Single Pane of Glass Series: FireEye Threat Analytics Platform (TAP)

As UserInsight grows and we look to add value to more incident response teams that have already chosen the solution that serves as their "single pane of glass", this series will update you on the integrations we build to share valuable context with those solutions. The Solution While FireEye and Mandiant were separately disrupting the security industry, they obtained a great deal of threat intelligence and indicators of compromise along the way. The FireEye Threat Analytics Platform (TAP for sh

13 min

Metasploit Gems From Scratch

Introduction As Metasploit adopts community best practices related to testing and code structure, we've started breaking up our new (and part of our old) work into separate projects that can developed and tested independently.  These smaller projects take the form of Ruby gems and Rails::Engines.  As we've made more and more gems, we've gotten a repeatable process for making new gems, but we thought our process might we useful for other developers in the community that are looking for a newer gu

5 min IT Ops

How to Avoid the Big Data Black Hole

It takes a lot of will power, in our data obsessed world to say “too much!” However, there are many ways where too much information is destroying productivity, and actually causing bad decision making, not good. But it is hard to avoid the world of opportunities that has been opened in data collection and analysis. So how do you balance the two? The first step is to understand there is a big difference between data collection, and it’s utilization. While it seems subtle, the difference is key, a

2 min Microsoft

Patch Tuesday - September 2014

It's a light round of Microsoft Patching this month.  Only four advisories, of which only one is critical.  The sole critical issue this month is the expected Internet Explorer roll up affecting all supported (and likely some unsupported) versions.  This IE roll up addresses 36 privately disclosed Remote Code Execution issues and 1 publically disclosed Information Disclosure issue which is under limited attack in the wild. This will be the top patching priority for this month. Of the three no

3 min IT Ops

Scaling with RESTful Microservice Architecture

As described in a previous post on this blog, we have been using the Dropwizard framework to quickly develop high quality, easily testable , RESTful microservices to expand the functionality of our product. These complement the existing multi-instance services running in our cluster and contribute to the continued scaling of the Logentries service.  Both i