Posts tagged Labs

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.

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 Labs

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.

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

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

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

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

9 min Project Sonar

Project Sonar Study of LDAP on the Internet

The topic of today's post is a Rapid7 Project Sonar [https://sonar.labs.rapid7.com/] study of publicly accessible LDAP services on the Internet. This research effort was started in July of this year and various portions of it continue today. In light of the Shadowserver Foundations's recent announcement [https://ldapscan.shadowserver.org/] regarding the availability relevant reports we thought it would be a good time to make some of our results public. The study was originally intended to be a

2 min Cloud Infrastructure

[Cloud Security Research] Cross-Cloud Adversary Analytics

Introducing Project Heisenberg Cloud Project Heisenberg Cloud is a Rapid7 Labs research project with a singular purpose: understand what attackers, researchers and organizations are doing in, across and against cloud environments. This research is based on data collected from a new, Rapid7-developed honeypot framework called Heisenberg along with internet reconnaissance data from Rapid7's Project Sonar [https://sonar.labs.rapid7.com/?CS=blog]. Internet-scale reconnaissance with cloud-inspired a

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