All posts by Douglas McKee

Introducing Hacktics and Telemetry, a Podcast from Rapid7 Labs

Post Syndicated from Douglas McKee original https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/tr-introducing-hacktics-telemetry-podcast-rapid7-labs

If you spend your days building, shipping, defending, or fixing systems, you already know how this goes. A new technique shows up in a research thread, someone drops a “has anyone checked if we’re exposed?” comment, and suddenly you’re juggling risk, patches, logging gaps, and whatever tool is in the blast radius this week.

That day-to-day reality is why Rapid7 Labs is launching Hacktics and Telemetry, a bi-weekly video and audio podcast with episodes built to fit into a lunch break or a commute. It’s hosted by Rapid7’s Douglas McKee, bringing to the pod years of deep technical and leadership experience, then co-hosted by Jonah ‘CryptoCat’ Burgess – a strong researcher with a solid pulse on the cybersecurity community.

The format stays consistent on purpose. Each episode starts with a scan of what’s emerging, shifts into a guest conversation, then closes with a short segment that ties the story back to mitigation and tooling. The goal is simple: move past theory, show what’s happening with real examples, and leave you with something you can act on.

Episode 1: OpenClaw Risks, RCEs, and Metasploit Pro Updates

Doug and Jonah open by digging into two AI-centric stories from the past week. The first is PhoneLeak, described as data exfiltration in Gemini via phone call. It’s the kind of uncomfortable example that forces practical questions: how do you defend against mobile clickjacking when it’s disguised as a routine CAPTCHA? When an AI assistant has deep extensions into a user’s workspace, how do you prevent malicious prompts from quietly accessing sensitive data like 2FA codes? And perhaps most importantly, how do defenders anticipate and monitor for bizarre, out-of-the-box exfiltration methods—like an AI bypassing SMS confirmations to leak data via DTMF tones on a phone call?

The second story comes from the other side of the AI conversation: an AI agent reportedly identifying an RCE in BeyondTrust remote support, plus discussion of older privileged remote access versions. More automation can mean faster discovery, which shrinks the window between “interesting finding” and “you need to patch this.” That changes how defenders think about exposure, patch prioritization, and what “good enough” means (and looks like) when it comes to monitoring.

In the guest segment, Greg Richardson (Global Advisory CISO & AI Thought Leader, 6 Levers AI) walks through how he uses AI agents in his workflow while keeping control tight. He talks about setting tasks while he sleeps, but the constraints are the point: access is locked down, the agent only touches files he explicitly provides, communication is limited, and token limits help cap the size of any mistake. He also makes a strong case for starting small, with one task at a time, instead of trying to automate dozens of things on day one.

To close out this inaugural episode, the team hits on a SolarWinds Help Desk vulnerability, then shares a quick look at Metasploit Pro 5.0 updates – including more granular payload selection and a walkthrough of the new UI.

If your idea of useful content includes threat trade-offs, concrete mitigations, and a bit of candid “how this actually plays out,” you’re in the right place.

Catch the full episode below:

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The Phone is Listening: A Cold War–Style Vulnerability in Modern VoIP

Post Syndicated from Douglas McKee original https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/ve-phone-listening-cold-war-vulnerability-modern-voip

I don’t know about you, but when I think about “critical vulnerabilities,” I usually picture ransomware, data theft, or maybe a server falling over at 2 a.m. while someone frantically searches Slack for the last good backup.

What I don’t picture is a scene straight out of a Cold War spy film.

CVE-2026-2329: Setting the scene

Dimly lit office. After hours. The city skyline glowing through the glass. Two executives leaning over a polished conference table, whispering about an acquisition. A red light blinking softly on the desk phone. Everything feels normal… Except it isn’t. Researchers at Rapid7 have disclosed CVE-2026-2329, a critical unauthenticated stack-based buffer overflow in the Grandstream GXP1600 series of VoIP phones. Let me take a moment to explain why that sentence, while technical and slightly dry on the surface, should make you sit up a little straighter.

At its core, this is a classic memory corruption issue. The kind many of us learned from in our early exploitation days. And if you’ve spent time in cybersecurity long enough, you’ve seen this movie before. But here’s where it gets interesting: an attacker finds an exposed VoIP phone – maybe it’s directly reachable, or maybe it’s pivoted to from somewhere else inside the network. They trigger the overflow, gain root, and at this point, nothing explodes. No alarms go off, and the phone doesn’t brick itself in protest. It just quietly accepts new instructions.

With root access, the attacker can reconfigure the device’s SIP settings to point to infrastructure they control. A malicious SIP proxy. Calls still dial. The display still lights up. The user still hears a dial tone. But now, every call flows through someone else’s hands first. There’s no dramatic “wiretap installed” moment. No van parked outside with antennas on the roof. Just silent, transparent interception. Conversations about contracts, negotiations, legal strategy, maybe even sensitive personal matters — all are relayed in real time.

This isn’t about crashing a device for fun, it’s about persistence and invisibility. VoIP phones are trusted implicitly. They sit on desks for years, deployed once and forgotten thereafter. Rarely monitored like servers or endpoints, and almost never treated as high-value assets. But voice carries nuance. Tone, intent, and strategy. Things you don’t always see in email or chat logs. The reality of it is that once you move from “denial of service” to “silent interception,” the impact shifts dramatically. This stops being a theoretical CVE in a spreadsheet and starts becoming a confidentiality issue at the human level.

Now, to be fair, exploitation requires knowledge and skill. This isn’t a one-click exploit with fireworks and a victory banner. But the underlying vulnerability lowers the barrier in a way that should concern anyone operating these devices in exposed or lightly-segmented environments. And that’s why this one caught my attention. Not because it’s the first buffer overflow we’ve ever seen, and not because it’s technically flashy, but because it works quietly. Perfectly.

Like a phone that never misses a call, but while someone else is listening.

The technical details on CVE-2026-2329

If you’re a researcher, engineer, or just someone who enjoys digging into stack layouts and exploit chains, we’ve put together a full technical deep dive on the Rapid7 blog. That includes:

  • Root cause analysis
  • Stack memory breakdown
  • Exploit development methodology
  • Post-exploitation impact
  • Metasploit module details

You can read the full technical analysis here.