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Son of SATAN? Weighing Security Software's Risks
ryanr writes "Rob Lemos put out an article on the new metasploit relese. The article reminds me of the furor over the original SATAN being released. H.D. Moore, who wrote it, rightly points out that there are commercial tools that do it better, and it's known that the kiddies have copies of those. Why pick on the open-source tool? I think Rob is being a bit provocative." Despite the headline ("Security tool more harmful than helpful?"), the article is actually pretty balanced.
Lets just assume that most 'bad' hackers have more knowledge of security flaws and holes than most system administrators.
I this scenario, a set of 'hacking' tools made availble to those administrators can help them find vulnerabilities, fix them, and then test if their solution is working properly.
If these tools were only available to people with the intention to abuse them, it would be much harder to secure a system.
Personally, I believe that currently the knowlegde of security flaws is greater among the hackers, since they specialize in exploiting them. Most administrators have many tasks besides system security. With a set of proper tools to diagnose their systems, security could be maintained with less effort.
I've known about and been exploiting the ms-its vulnerability for a full week and then some now. I had a Proof-of-Concept within the first 2 hours of the original post by a concerned IRC user on bugtraq.
While this tool doesn't test for IE vulnerabilities like the one I have been exploiting, it covers a lot of commonly used attacks that have already been done by script kiddies for (in some cases like the apache chunked vulnerability) upwards of two years!
It also tests a lot of "duh" kinds of exploits that any serious web, mail, and NT/2000/2003 administrator would want to test. Admins and security consultants have been using Nessus for the last three years or so and people don't question that anymore.
I think the issue here with Metasploit's Framework is that it's modular, so script-kiddies like me can sit back and develop and trade exploits. My response to that is: get over it.
I've been trading exploits for so long now with my *own* PERL code that the only thing this program does is maybe cut my time down in half. And why would I want to release a module for Metasploit when I can make my own EXE's using perlcc and Cygwin?
If anything, perlcc and Cygwin contribute more to proliferation. And I kind of doubt they are going the way of the dodo anytime soon.