Tag Archives: tCell

Deploy tCell More Easily With the New AWS AMI Agent

Post Syndicated from Tom Caiazza original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/07/18/deploy-tcell-more-easily-with-the-new-aws-ami-agent/

Deploy tCell More Easily With the New AWS AMI Agent

Rapid7’s tCell is a powerful tool that allows you to monitor risk and protect web applications and APIs in real time. Great! It’s a fundamental part of our push to make web application security as strong and comprehensive as it needs to be in an age when web application attacks account for roughly 70% of cybersecurity incidents.

But with that power comes complexity, and we know that not every customer has the same resources available both in-house or externally to leverage tCell in all its glory right out of the box. With our newest agent addition, we’re hoping to make that experience a little bit easier.

AWS AMI Agent for tCell

We’ve introduced the AWS AMI Agent for tCell, which makes it easier to deploy tCell into your software development life cycle (SDLC) without the need to manually configure tCell. If you aren’t as familiar with deploying web apps and need help getting tCell up and running, you can now deploy tCell with ease and get runtime protection on your apps within minutes.

If you use Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can now quickly launch a tCell agent with NGINX as a reverse proxy. This is placed in front of your existing web app without having to make development or code changes. To make things even easier, the new AWS AMI Agent even comes pre-equipped with a helper utility (with the NGINX agent pre-installed) that allows you to configure your tCell agent in a single command.

Shift left seamlessly

So why is this such an important new deployment method for tCell customers? Simply put, it’s a way to better utilize and understand tCell before making a case to your team of developers. To get the most out of tCell, it’s best to get buy-in from your developers, as deployment efforts traditionally can require bringing the dev team into the fold in a significant way.

With the AWS AMI Agent, your security team can utilize tCell right away, with limited technical knowledge, and use those learnings (and security improvements) to make the case that a full deployment of the tCell agent is in your dev team’s best interest. We’ve seen this barrier with some existing customers and with the overall shift-left approach within the web application community at large.

This new deployment offering is a way for your security team to get comfortable with the benefits (and there are many) of securing your web applications with tCell. They will better understand how to secure AWS-hosted web apps and how the two products work together seamlessly.

If you’d like to give it a spin, we recommend heading over to the docs to find out more.

The AWS AMI Agent is available to all existing tCell customers right now.

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It’s the Summer of AppSec: Q2 Improvements to Our Industry-Leading DAST and WAAP

Post Syndicated from Tom Caiazza original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/07/13/its-the-summer-of-appsec-q2-improvements-to-our-industry-leading-dast-and-waap/

It’s the Summer of AppSec: Q2 Improvements to Our Industry-Leading DAST and WAAP

Summer is in full swing, and that means soaring temperatures, backyard grill-outs, and the latest roundup of Q2 application security improvements from Rapid7. Yes, we know you’ve been waiting for this moment with more anticipation than Season 4 of Stranger Things. So let’s start running up that hill, not beat around the bush (see what we did there?), and dive right in.

OWASP Top 10 for application security

Way, way back in September of 2021 (it feels like it was yesterday), the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) released its top 10 list of critical web application security risks. Naturally, we were all over it, as OWASP is one of the most trusted voices in cybersecurity, and their Top 10 lists are excellent places to start understanding where and how threat actors could be coming for your applications. We released a ton of material to help our customers better understand and implement the recommendations from OWASP.

This quarter, we were able to take those protections another big step forward by providing an OWASP 2021 Attack Template and Report for InsightAppSec. With this new feature, your security team can work closely with development teams to discover and remediate vulnerabilities in ways that jive with security best practice. It also helps to focus your AppSec program around the updated categories provided by OWASP (which we highly suggest you do).

The new attack template includes all the relevant attacks included in the updated OWASP Top 10 list which means you can focus on the most important vulnerabilities to remediate, rather than be overwhelmed by too many vulnerabilities and not focusing on the right ones. Once the vulns are discovered, InsightAppSec helps your development team to remediate the issues in several different ways, including a new OWASP Top 10 report and the ability to let developers confirm vulnerabilities and fixes with Attack Replay.

Scan engine and attack enhancements

Product support for OWASP 2021 wasn’t the only improvement we made to our industry-leading DAST this quarter. In fact, we’ve been quite busy adding additional attack coverage and making scan engine improvements to increase coverage and accuracy for our customers. Here are just a few.

Spring4Shell attacks and protections with InsightAppSec and tCell

We instituted a pair of improvements to InsightAppSec and tCell meant to identify and block the now-infamous Spring4Shell vulnerability. We now have included a default RCE attack module specifically to test for the Spring4Shell vulnerability with InsightAppSec. That feature is available to all InsightAppSec customers right now, and we highly recommend using it to prevent this major vulnerability from impacting your applications.

Additionally, for those customers leveraging tCell to protect their apps, we’ve added new detections and the ability to block Spring4Shell attacks against your web applications. In addition, we’ve added Spring4Shell coverage for our Runtime SCA capability. Check out more here on both of these new enhancements.

New out-of-band attack module

We’ve added a new out-of-band SQL injection module similar to Log4Shell, except it leverages the DNS protocol, which is typically less restricted and used by the adversary. It’s included in the “All Attacks” attack template and can be added to any customer attack template.

Improved scanning for session detection

We have made improvements to our scan engine on InsightAppSec to better detect unwanted logouts. When configuring authentication, the step-by-step instructions will guide you through configuring this process for your web applications.

Making it easier for our customers

This wouldn’t be a quarterly feature update if we didn’t mention ways we are making InsightAppSec and tCell even easier and more efficient for our customers. In the last few months, we have moved the “Manage Columns” function into “Vulnerabilities” in InsightAppSec to make it even more customizable. You can now also hide columns, drag and drop them where you would like, and change the order in ways that meet your needs.

We’ve also released an AWS AMI of the tCell nginx agent to make it easier for current customers to deploy tCell. This is perfect for those who are familiar with AWS and want to get up and running with tCell fast. Customers who also want a basic understanding of how tCell works and want to share tCell’s value with their dev teams will find this new AWS AMI to provide insight fast.

Summer may be a time to take it easy and enjoy the sunshine, but we’re going to be just as hard at work making improvements to InsightAppSec and tCell over the next three months as we were in the last three. With a break for a hot dog and some fireworks in there somewhere. Stay tuned for more from us and have a great summer.

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Let’s Dance: InsightAppSec and tCell Bring New DevSecOps Improvements in Q1

Post Syndicated from Nate Crampton original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/04/15/lets-dance-insightappsec-and-tcell-bring-new-devsecops-improvements-in-q1/

To the left, to the left, to the right, right — the CI/CD Pipeline is on the move.

Let's Dance: InsightAppSec and tCell Bring New DevSecOps Improvements in Q1

DevSecOps is all about adding security across the application lifecycle. A popular approach to application security is to shift left, which means moving security earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This makes sense: If you find a critical security bug in production, it costs a lot more to resolve it than if you found it in development.

In Q1 2022, we’ve continued to invest in improvements to InsightAppSec and tCell that help organizations shift left and automate security testing prior to production deployment. And at the same time, we’ve made other enhancements to make your life easier. Oh… and we added new attacks and blocking rules for Spring4Shell.

Shifting app security testing left in the CI/CD pipeline

Your development teams are innovating and releasing features and new experiences faster than ever before. Manual testing can no longer keep up with the speed of innovation. Taking a DevSecOps approach means baking security across the application lifecycle and includes shifting left whenever possible.

Dynamic application security testing (DAST) solutions simulate attacks just like the attackers, and they’re known for their accuracy and coverage across a wide range of technologies. However, traditional DAST solutions have struggled to work with modern applications and software development methodologies.

Since the launch of InsightAppSec — Rapid7’s industry leading cloud-native DAST — we’ve focused on providing coverage of modern applications, as well as being able to integrate as far left as the build process.

“Our app developers don’t need to come to me, they don’t need to come to our team, they don’t need to send emails. They don’t need to go through any formalities. When they commit code, the scan happens automatically. And, we created the metrics. So, if they see high-rated vulnerabilities they cannot push to production. The code will get blocked and they have to remediate it.”

– Midhun Kumar, Head of Infrastructure and Cloud Operations, Pearl Data Direct

Building on the success of our Jenkins Plugin, Atlassian Bamboo Plugin, and Azure DevOps CI/CD integrations, we recently added native GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD integrations into InsightAppSec.

GitHub

GitHub Actions allows development teams to automate software workflows. With our new InsightAppSec Scan Action for GitHub, you can easily pull down the repo and add it to your DevOps pipelines. As part of your actions, you can trigger the InsightAppSec scan and have the results passed back into GitHub actions. If you want, you can add scan gating to prevent vulnerable code from being deployed to production.

This is available for no additional cost in the GitHub Marketplace.

GitLab

GitLab CI/CD can automatically build, test, deploy, and monitor your applications. With our new InsightAppSec Scan Job, you can add a Docker command in your pipeline to trigger a scan. The results are sent back, and you can add scan gating to prevent vulnerable code from being deployed to production.

The feature is available for no additional cost, and we have resources to help you learn how to setup the GitLab integration.

Spring4Shell testing and protection

CVE-2022-22965, a zero-day vulnerability announced on April 1st, is no April Fools’ Day joke. While it’s not as dreadful as Log4Shell, it should still be patched, and there are reports of the Spring4Shell flaw being used to install the Mirai Botnet malware.

To help our customers secure their applications and understand their risk from Spring4Shell, Rapid7 released new capabilities, including:

  • New RCE Attack Module for Spring4Shell (InsightAppSec)
  • New Block Rule for Spring4Shell (tCell)
  • New Detection of CVE-2022-22965 in running applications (tCell)

Other enhancements

InsightAppSec comes with the ability to create custom dashboards to quickly view and get insights on the risk and status of your program. Relying on feedback from customers, we recently added the ability to create dashboards based on certain apps or groups of apps. This allows you to quickly view risk in context of what matters.

Customers often like to manage their applications at scale, and one of the easiest ways to do that is via the tCell API. Significant feature enhancements include App Firewall event and block rules, OS commands, Local Files, suspicious actors, and more have all been added or updated. Check out our API documentation.

Rapid7’s application security portfolio can help you shift left as well as shift right, depending on your needs and the status of your program. You can integrate InsightAppSec DAST into your CI/CD pipelines before deployment to production. And with tCell, you can add web application and API protection for your production environments.

Stay tuned for all we have in store in Q2!

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Securing Your Applications Against Spring4Shell (CVE-2022-22965)

Post Syndicated from Bria Grangard original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/04/01/securing-your-applications-against-spring4shell-cve-2022-22965/

Securing Your Applications Against Spring4Shell (CVE-2022-22965)

The warm weather is starting to roll in, the birds are chirping, and Spring… well, Spring4Shell is making a timely entrance. If you’re still recovering from Log4Shell, we’re here to tell you you’re not alone. While discovery and research of CVE-2022-22965 is evolving, Rapid7 is committed to providing our customers updates and guidance. In this blog, we wanted to share some recent product enhancements across our application security portfolio to help our customers with easy ways to test and secure their apps against Spring4Shell.

What is Spring4Shell?

Before we jump into how we can help you with our products, let’s give a quick overview of Spring4Shell. CVE-2022-22965 affects Spring MVC and Spring WebFlux applications running JDK versions 9 and later. A new feature was introduced in JDK version 9 that allows access to the ClassLoader from a Class. This vulnerability can be exploited for remote code execution (RCE). If you’re looking for more detailed information on Spring4Shell, check out our overview blog here.

Updated: RCE Attack Module for Spring4Shell

Customers leveraging InsightAppSec, our dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool, can regularly assess the risk of their applications. InsightAppSec allows you to configure 100+ types of web attacks to simulate real-world exploitation attempts. While it may be April 1st, we’re not foolin’ around when it comes to our excitement in sharing this update to our RCE Attack Module that we’ve included in the default All Modules Attack Template – specifically testing for Spring4Shell.

Cloud customers who already have the All Modules Attack Template enabled will automatically benefit from this new RCE attack as part of their regular scan cadence. Please note that these updates are only available for InsightAppSec cloud engines. However, we expect updates for on-premises engines to follow shortly. For those customers with on-premises engines, make sure to have auto-upgrade turned on for your on-prem engines to have the latest and greatest version of the engine.

Securing Your Applications Against Spring4Shell (CVE-2022-22965)

NEW: Block against Spring4Shell attacks

In addition to assessing your applications for attacks with InsightAppSec, we’ve also got you covered when it comes to protecting your in-production applications. With tCell, customers can both detect and block anomalous activity, such as Spring4Shell exploit attempts. Check out the GIF below on how to enable the recently added Spring RCE block rule in tCell.

Securing Your Applications Against Spring4Shell (CVE-2022-22965)

NEW: Identify vulnerable packages (such as CVE-2022-22965)

A key component of Spring4Shell is detecting whether or not you have any vulnerable packages. tCell customers leveraging the Java agent can determine if they have any vulnerable packages, including CVE-2022-22965, in their runtime environment.

Simply navigate to tCell on the Insight Platform, select your application, and navigate to the Packages and Vulns tab. Here you can view any vulnerable packages that were detected at runtime, and follow the specified remediation guidance.

Securing Your Applications Against Spring4Shell (CVE-2022-22965)

Currently, the recommended mitigation guidance is for Spring Framework users to update to the fixed versions. Further information on the vulnerability and ongoing guidance are being provided in Spring’s blog here.

Utilize OS commands

One of the benefits of using tCell’s app server agents is the fact that you can enable blocking (after confirming you’re not blocking any legitimate commands) for OS commands. This will prevent a wide range of exploits including Shell commands. Below you will see an example of our OS Commands dashboard highlighting the execution attempts, and in the second graphic, you’ll see the successfully blocked OS command events.

Securing Your Applications Against Spring4Shell (CVE-2022-22965)

Securing Your Applications Against Spring4Shell (CVE-2022-22965)

What’s next?

We recommend following Spring’s latest guidance on remediation to reduce risk in your applications. If you’re looking for more information at any time, we will continue to update both this blog, and our initial response blog to Spring4Shell. Additionally, you can always reach out to your customer success manager, support resources, or anyone on your Rapid7 account team. Happy April – and here’s to hoping the only shells you deal with in the future are those found on the beach!

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A December to Remember — Or, How We Improved InsightAppSec in Q4 in the Midst of Log4Shell

Post Syndicated from Tom Caiazza original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/01/12/a-december-to-remember-or-how-we-improved-insightappsec-in-q4-in-the-midst-of-log4shell/

A December to Remember — Or, How We Improved InsightAppSec in Q4 in the Midst of Log4Shell

Ho, ho, holy cow — what a wild way to wrap up the year that was. Thousands of flights were cancelled during Christmas week, nearly every holiday party became a super-spreader event, and we lost a legend in Betty White. In our neck of the woods, Log4Shell has been dominating the conversation for nearly the entire holiday season. But now that much of the initial fervor has passed, we wanted to take a moment to recap some of InsightAppSec and tCell’s Q4 highlights and give us all a little much-deserved break from the madness.

RBAC

It may not seem like much, but remote-based access control — or RBAC— is a game-changer for many teams looking to streamline their access to InsightAppSec. Essentially, we make it super simple to configure access to the platform perfectly for every member of your team, create tiers of accessibility for different job roles, and ensure everyone has exactly what they need to do their jobs on day one.

Included is a new pre-built remediator role, which was designed to only show developers what they need in order to address a that vulnerability. They can drill into it, see reference details and remediation steps, and replay the attack in their dev or staging environments, all in an easy, navigable interface. This new role helps prevent the back-and-forth between security and development passing vulnerability details.

The key to our new feature is scalability. Regardless of whether you have a team of 10 or a team of 1,000, each group will only have the permissions they need to view the data you want them to see — all without the back-and-forth that comes with creating permissions ad hoc. It’s a time-saver, for sure, but it can also reduce headaches and make costly mistakes far less likely. If you want to learn more check out our blog post on the subject (it’s got a cute Goldilocks theme — you’ll get the drift).

ServiceNow

Oh, yeah, we’re fully integrated with ServiceNow. It’s just a leader in IT service management, and InsightAppSec is fully integrated, working seamlessly, and available in the ServiceNow app store for, like, zero dollars. No biggie.

This integration offers a lot of great features that will save your team time and effort, improving everything from visibility, to prioritization, to remediation. In fact, remediation will happen even faster than it already does with updates automatically happening across both ServiceNow and InsightAppSec tickets. And it’s so simple and quick to install, you’ll be benefiting from it in minutes. Oh, and did we mention zero dollars?

Log4Shell

OK, break’s over. Yes, we made many improvements to InsightAppSec this quarter, but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the ones we made for Log4Shell. The big one is a new InsightAppSec default attack template for Out of Band Injection specific to Log4Shell attacks. Attack templates are InsightAppSec’s bread and butter, testing every part of your application against known attack vectors. With this feature, we have an attack template that can automate a sophisticated attack by simulating an attacker on your website and injects code in your application. If the code is vulnerable, it calls a Log4j function to send a JNDI call to a Rapid7 server validating the exploitability of the application. This helps you identify and prioritize Log4Shell vulnerabilities before they become real threats.

For even more flexibility, we’ve added an attack module that actually does the out-of-band Log4Shell attack during testing. You can easily select this in the Log4Shell attack template, but you can can also create a custom template and add the new Log4Shell attack module to that.

We’ve also improved tCell’s ability to protect against Log4Shell attacks. We launched a new app firewall protection specifically for Log4Shell attacks. The new firewall lets our customers know if their apps have been attacked through the Log4Shell vulnerability and drill down to specifics on the attack. We’ve also created a default pattern that allows you to block well known Log4Shell patterns and as more become known, we will continue our updates.

Even more

While these were just a few of the major improvements we made to InsightAppSec and tCell this quarter, there were certainly a host of minor ones that are sure to make the platform easier and more efficient. They include custom NGINX builds and support for .Net 6.0 for tCell, Archiving Scan Targets, and customizing executive reports for InsightAppSec, among others.

Those are the highlights from the fourth quarter of 2021 from here in InsightAppSec-land. We’re well on our way to making Q1 2022 even better for our customers, though we can’t do anything about those flight cancellations. And while we’re at it, someone check on Keith Richards.

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How to Protect Your Applications Against Log4Shell With tCell

Post Syndicated from Bria Grangard original https://blog.rapid7.com/2021/12/15/how-to-protect-your-applications-against-log4shell-with-tcell/

How to Protect Your Applications Against Log4Shell With tCell

By now, we’re sure you’re familiar with all things Log4Shell – but we want to make sure we share how to protect your applications. Applications are a critical part of any organization’s attack surface, and we’re seeing thousands of Log4Shell attack attempts in our customers’ environments every hour. Let’s walk through the various ways tCell can help our customers protect against Log4Shell attacks.

1. Monitor for any Log4Shell attack attempts

tCell is a web application and API protection solution that has traditional web application firewall monitoring capabilities such as monitoring attacks. Over the weekend, we launched a new App Firewall detection for all tCell customers. This means tCell customers can leverage our App Firewall functionality to determine if any Log4Shell attack attempts have taken place. From there, customers can also drill in to more information on the events that took place. We’ve created a video to walk you through how to detect an Log4Shell attack attempts using the App Firewall feature in tCell in the video below.



How to Protect Your Applications Against Log4Shell With tCell

As a reminder, customers will need to make sure they have deployed the JVM agent on their apps to begin monitoring their applications’ activity. Make sure to check out our Quick Start Guide if you need help setting up tCell.

2. Block against Log4Shell attacks

Monitoring is great, but what you may be looking for is something that protects your application by blocking Log4Shell attack attempts. In order to do this, we’ve added a default pattern (tc-cmdi-4) for customers to block against. Below is a video on how to set up this custom block rule, or reach out to the tCell team if you need any assistance rolling this out at large.



How to Protect Your Applications Against Log4Shell With tCell

As research continues and new patterns are identified, we will provide updates to tc-cdmi-4 to improve coverage. Customers have already noted how the new default pattern is providing more protection coverage than yesterday.

3. Identify vulnerable packages (such as CVE 2021-44228)

We’ve heard from customers that they’re unsure of whether or not their applications are leveraging the vulnerable package. With tCell, we will alert you if any vulnerable packages (such as CVE 2021-44228 and CVE 2021-45046) are loaded by the application at runtime. The best way to eliminate the risk exposure for Log4Shell is to upgrade any vulnerable packages to 2.16. Check out the video below for more information.



How to Protect Your Applications Against Log4Shell With tCell

If you would like to provide additional checks outside of the vulnerable packages check at runtime, please refer to our blog on how InsightVM can help you do this.

4. Enable OS commands

One of the benefits of using tCell’s app server agents is the fact that you can enable blocking for OS commands. This will prevent a wide range of exploits leveraging things like curl, wget, etc. Below you’ll find a picture of how to enable OS commands (either report only or block and report).

How to Protect Your Applications Against Log4Shell With tCell

5. Detect and block suspicious actors

All events that are detected by the App Firewall in tCell are fed into the analytics engine to determine Suspicious Actors. The Suspicious Actors feature takes in multiple inputs (such as failed logins, injections, unusual inputs, etc.) and correlates these to an IP address.

How to Protect Your Applications Against Log4Shell With tCell

Not only can you monitor for suspicious actors with tCell, but you can also configure tCell to block all activity or just the suspicious activity from the malicious actor’s IP.

How to Protect Your Applications Against Log4Shell With tCell

All the components together make the magic happen

The power of tCell isn’t in one or two features, but rather its robust capability set, which we believe is required to secure any environment with a defense-in-depth approach. We will help customers not only identify vulnerable Log4j packages that are being used, but also assist with monitoring for suspicious activity and block attacks. The best security is when you have multiple types of defenses available to protect against bad actors, and this is why using the capabilities mentioned here will prove to be valuable in protecting against Log4Shell and future threats.

Get more critical insights about defending against Log4Shell

Check out our resource center

tCell by Rapid7 Supports the Newly Released .NET 6.0

Post Syndicated from Bria Grangard original https://blog.rapid7.com/2021/11/10/tcell-by-rapid7-supports-the-newly-released-net-6-0/

tCell by Rapid7 Supports the Newly Released .NET 6.0

We’re excited to share that we’ve coordinated our recent .NET and .NET Core agent releases with the brand new .NET 6.0 release from Microsoft.

What is tCell?

Since the founding of tCell by Rapid7, our web application and API protection solution, we’ve prided ourselves on providing both breadth and depth of coverage. We recognize the importance of shifting left in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), and we also see the equal importance of shifting right. This is why Rapid7 approaches application security from a holistic perspective that’s inclusive of testing, monitoring, and protecting to prevent the exploitation of web applications and APIs across the SDLC.

In addition to coverage throughout the SDLC, we recognize modern applications require modern AppSec solutions to meet them where they are. This is why our solution offers flexible deployment options including our App-Server agents, Web-Server agents, proxy agents, and CDN agents. So whether you’re securing a traditional application written in Java, you’re a Windows shop, or you’re deploying applications with a Kubernetes architecture, we’ve got you covered.

Sounds great… but what’s new?

Today, Microsoft announced the release of .NET 6, a significant release with an expected lifetime of 3 years and a slew of new features. Today, tCell also announced support for .NET 6. This is in line with a promise to our customers to support modern languages and frameworks, as soon as possible.

With this new tCell release, customers leveraging .NET or .NET Core frameworks will continue to be supported with our native .NET and .NET Core agents. Additionally, we’ve added functionality for new and existing tCell customers. For those customers who are leveraging tCell’s .NET or .NET Core agents 2.2+, they will now have full visibility into their API endpoints. What’s this mean? tCell will automatically enumerate your application’s API endpoints and show you attack attempts, attack types, and any app exceptions.

tCell by Rapid7 Supports the Newly Released .NET 6.0

This is helpful because it provides visibility into key API endpoints, what attacks were attempted, and what attacks were successful, automatically reducing the number of high alerts our customers receive. From here, customers can drill down for more context on the attack attempts and view detailed stack trace information.

tCell by Rapid7 Supports the Newly Released .NET 6.0

So, tell me more!

In addition to the real-time monitoring and detection for your web applications and APIs, tCell provides a robust set of use cases that it helps solve when leveraging either our .NET or .NET Core agents. Here are just a few examples:

  • Want visibility into your dev teams’ third-party packages and their associated vulnerabilities? Check out our runtime software composition analysis (SCA) feature, which will highlight any vulnerable third party code.
  • Want to make sure no one gets access to your user accounts? Attackers will often use a stolen list of credentials to login to an app and mimic real user behavior. With tCell’s Account Takeover capabilities, we monitor for these auth events and can take action on blocking anyone that is deemed a threat. We can also share a list of compromised users your team can follow up on.
  • Want to ensure your apps only load specific content? tCell makes it seamless and easy to enable Content Security Policies to enforce what content is loaded on your site and ensure a safe and happy user experience.
  • … And so much more, from specific actor detection to prevention of unauthorized executions of OS commands and app-level attacks.

We’re proud of our continued investment in helping customers secure their applications and APIs. Curious to learn more? Feel free to reach out to get a demo of tCell or try it out yourself!

OWASP Top 10 Deep Dive: Getting a Clear View on Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Post Syndicated from Amukta Nayak original https://blog.rapid7.com/2021/11/08/owasp-top-10-deep-dive-getting-a-clear-view-on-vulnerable-and-outdated-components/

OWASP Top 10 Deep Dive: Getting a Clear View on Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Most of us think of climbing the ladder as a good thing — but when the ladder in question is OWASP’s Top 10 list of application security risks, a sudden upward trajectory is cause for alarm rather than encouragement.

In the 2021 edition of the OWASP list, vulnerable and outdated components moved up 3 positions from 9th place to 6th. This change in status reflects the increasing importance of this vulnerability in modern application development — and the growing worry with which the security community views this risk. In fact, it was rated at No. 2 in the OWASP Top 10 community survey.

So, what’s behind the meteoric rise of this category in the minds of application security pros?

The challenge of visibility

The prevalence of vulnerable and outdated components — and the ease of attacks using this vector — make this an especially dangerous category. Almost all modern applications use open-source packages, and information about vulnerabilities related to these packages is widely available. Attackers who figure out what vulnerable packages you’re using can use exploits that are already available. That means you have a type of attack that is widespread and straightforward.

But while upgrading and managing vulnerable and outdated components might seem simple in theory, many organizations find that, in practice, the task is anything but easy.

To complicate matters further, modern applications are using an increasing number of third-party and open-source packages. Estimates suggest around 90% of modern applications are utilizing open-source components. With a large number of dependencies — including those often-overlooked nested dependencies — regularly scanning your source code and keeping up to date with security bulletins and remediation information is daunting.

With modern CI/CD pipelines and complex infrastructure, there’s a large gap between development and production, giving teams low visibility into what’s running on production instances. Between source code and application instances, there’s often complex machinery, multiple teams involved, and multiple points of failure. This makes it challenging for SOC analysts, incident responders, and security teams to get information they need, including:

  • The difference between vulnerabilities that are in production vs development
  • Vulnerability exposure duration
  • The difference between multiple application instances

Achieving clarity

Having the right tools in place to get a clearer view of this complex picture is key to understanding where there might be vulnerable components in your application build and remediating them quickly — before a vulnerability becomes a breach.

tCell by Rapid7 provides teams with an end-to-end approach that considers both development and production. After the application is deployed, the tCell server agent inspects packages at server startup and sends per-host package and version information to the tCell backend. Through a multitude of sources including Snyk Intel, NVD, and proprietary research, tCell is providing daily-updated vulnerability and remediation information, the tCell dashboard provides this information and more, including out-of-date packages and mismatched versions.

The packages dashboard shows a summary of packages and versions, filterable by vulnerabilities. This dashboard only has packages and versions that either were live at some point or are currently live on application instances. This helps filter out the noise for security teams, so they can see the real, critical issues and remediate them quickly.

OWASP Top 10 Deep Dive: Getting a Clear View on Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Each package in the package dashboard has an overview providing vulnerability and remediation information.

OWASP Top 10 Deep Dive: Getting a Clear View on Vulnerable and Outdated Components

As you drill further down, each package overview has information about exposure duration broken down per host.

OWASP Top 10 Deep Dive: Getting a Clear View on Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Any application that uses open-source and third-party packages is at risk for attacks that leverage vulnerable and outdated components. In modern application development, that’s nearly all of them.

But managing the many layers of dependencies inherent in applications that use open-source components is a challenging task for security teams, and the issues only grow worse with complex infrastructure between development and production. A tool like tCell can provide security teams the clarity they need to cut through the complexity of today’s application development and production workflows, catching vulnerable components early and patching them quickly.

Check out our previous post on this year’s top threat on the OWASP list: injection.

This Was the Summer of AppSec: All the Improvements We Made in Q3

Post Syndicated from Tom Caiazza original https://blog.rapid7.com/2021/10/12/this-was-the-summer-of-appsec-all-the-improvements-we-made-in-q3/

This Was the Summer of AppSec: All the Improvements We Made in Q3

Summer has come to an end. The backyard barbecues are behind us, the hot dogs have all been eaten, and we’re all gearing up for some awesome autumn leaf peeping. But before we fall into another season (see what we did there?), we wanted to take a moment to look back on all of the improvements we’ve made to InsightAppSec and tCell over the last 3 months.

At Rapid7, we’re obsessed with making your lives easier, so it’s no surprise that most of our biggest improvements to the platform help our customers do more in less time and with less stress. We took a look at authentication, validation, remediation, and auditing. We’ve punched up our tCell API capabilities, and we’ve rolled these out this summer to give you more time to focus on the important work of securing your applications (and hopefully having a few well-deserved drinks with those little umbrellas in them). In short, we worked hard all summer so that you can sleep easier this fall.

So, let’s make like a backyard pool and dive in.

InsightAppSec improvements

Here are the most noteworthy updates we made to InsightAppSec in Q3:

Automated authentication

Most modern web applications and APIs leverage credentials to improve security. That’s great! But for the security professional doing scan after scan day in and day out to find vulnerabilities, this could mean constant toggling back and forth to put in the right credentials on the right screens at the right times to make sure the scans run properly.

No more! We’ve automated authentication, streamlining the entire configuration process. When you run a new application scan, the authentication page has the automated option as default, saving you and your team tons of time and confusion. You always have the option to create macros, but once you see how smooth the automated process is now, we doubt you’ll ever go back.

Validation scanning

We’ve added a new capability that allows security teams to scan for previously discovered vulnerabilities and be sure they’ve been remediated. Prior to this update, security teams had to open individual vulnerabilities, manually run an attack replay, and if the vuln was remediated, mark it that way. With our new validation scanning feature, you can target all vulnerabilities within a scan and see if they have been remediated or not. It targets existing vulnerabilities and tells your team whether you are good to go.

No more running attack replays for each vulnerability — now, you can check that the work was done in bulk, saving your team time and probably more than a few headaches. What’s more, it can help you identify other unknown vulnerabilities that may have been introduced between full scans.

Prioritizing remediations

Not all vulnerabilities are created equal, and knowing which ones to prioritize remediating first is an important part of a security team’s workflow. InsightAppSec now supports CVSS 3.1 to give security teams the the granularity and context they need to properly triage and prioritize app vulnerabilities.

This industry standard will help you understand which vulns to patch first and which ones can wait, even if they have the same level of severity within the InsightAppSec platform scan. The deeper you can dive into the nature of the vulnerability, the safer your application will ultimately be.

Platform auditing comes to InsightAppSec

If you’re one of the thousands of companies that use more than one Rapid7 product — first of all, thanks — we’ve created a centralized auditing platform that works across multiple R7 solutions. This makes it easier to investigate user activities or share activity with auditors as you meet your compliance obligations.

In other words, we’re making your auditing of tasks easier. InsightAppSec sends auditing logs directly to the Insight platform showing events such as applications, targets, scan configurations, and files.

tCell Improvements

Now, let’s roll the highlight reel of our Q3 updates to tCell:

Sending events through the Insight Connector

Not every organization has the same security requirements, and for those that are using tCell, that can mean needing a single outbound connection from their environment into the Insight platform. Now you can send those events through the Insight Connector in one stream of data as a proxy removing multiple streams and reducing points of vulnerability.

Improving the API experience

Getting the right information to the right place at the right time is key to maintaining a strong security infrastructure. We’ve improved tCell’s API to set alert preferences and allow alerts to be sent to other platforms like Slack. For organizations with multiple security teams working in tandem, this can help keep everyone on the same page and ensure that the right alerts are seen by the right people.

But that’s not the only improvement we’ve made to tCell’s API. Customers can now configure and copy policies. Those tasks can be automated at scale, so no need to manually update via the UI.

These are just a few of the improvements we’ve made to InsightAppSec and tCell over the last few months and we promise there are even more on the way this fall. If you’d like to learn more about our automated authentication feature, we’ve got a handy blog post for you here.

Now go and grab a pumpkin-spiced latte — you’ve earned it.

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