Handle With Linux

The newsophere was abuzz this morning with the discovery that Energizer's "DUO" USB Battery Charger included a malicious backdoor in the accompanying software. This backdoor was only discovered after the product was discontinued, leading some to believe that it went through its entire lifecycle undetected.

Last week we released Metasploit 3.3.2 following on the heels of Metasploit 3.3.1. This release marked a major change to how the Meterpreter backend processed commands; instead of running each request serially, the Meterpreter now spawns a background thread for each request.

On December 1st, Rapid7 announced the Community Edition of the NeXpose vulnerability management product. At the same time, we released version 3.3.1 of the Metasploit Framework, which contains the first step towards full integration between NeXpose and Metasploit.

Since mid-December, the Metasploit team has been working non-stop towards version 3.4.0 of the Metasploit Framework. The final release is still scheduled for mid-May, but I wanted to share some of the upcoming features, available today from the development tree. Version 3.4.0 includes major improvements to the Meterpreter payload, the expansion of the framework’s brute force capabilities, and the complete overhaul of the backend database schema and event subsystem.

The Metasploit Console (msfconsole) has supported the concept of resource files for quite some time. A resource file is essentially a batch script for Metasploit; using these files you can automate common tasks. If you create a resource script called ~/.msf3/msfconsole.rc, it will automatically load each time you start the msfconsole interface. This is a great way to automatically connect to a database and set common parameters (setg PAYLOAD, etc). Until this morning, however, resource scripts were limited to simple console commands.

Back on April 9th, Tavis Ormandy dropped a bit of a bomb shell on the full-disclosure mailing list [1]. To summarize, Tavis found that a DBD attack was possible utilizing the latest Java Runtime. He reported it to Oracle/Sun, which assessed its severity and stated they didn't plan to patch it out of cycle. Based on his tweets, Tavis found out that other researchers were aware of this issue, and decided to disclose the issue to the public without delay.

On March 12th and 13th, a researcher named "villy" posted a couple of blogs relating to an exploit for CVE-2010-0188. On the 15th, I ported that exploit (python) over to Metasploit (ruby), which you can find here, in the module browser. Doing so is often rather straight forward, and in this particular case was no different.

This morning we released version 3.3.3 of the Metasploit Framework - this release focuses on exploit rankings, session automation, and bug fixes. The exploit rank indicates how reliable the exploit is and how likely it is for the exploit to have a negative impact on the target system. This ranking can be used to prevent exploits below a certain rank from being used and limit the impact to a particular target.

This afternoon a question came up on the #metasploit IRC channel (irc.freenode.net). The questioner asked: "Should a good penetration tester know assembly?". This lead to some discussion about when and where assembly language skills become important in the scope of a penetration test. My normal response to "Should I learn [something]?" questions is always a resounding YES; it is hard to know too much as a penetration tester or system auditor.

Botnet agents and malware go through inordinate lengths to hide their command and control traffic. From a penetration testing perspective, emulating these types of communication channels is possible, but often requires a custom toolkit to be deployed to the target. In this post I will walk through using the standard Metasploit Meterpreter payload as a persistent encrypted remote control tool.

One of the questions that we often hear is "What systems can i use to test against?" Based on this, we thought it would be a good idea throw together an exploitable VM that you can use for testing purposes.Metasploitable is an Ubuntu 8.04 server install on a VMWare 6.5 image. A number of vulnerable packages are included, including an install of tomcat 5.5 (with weak credentials), distcc, tikiwiki, twiki, and an older mysql.