[Infowarrior] - Metasploit Project Sold To Rapid7

[Richard Forno]

  Metasploit Project Sold To Rapid7

Open-source Metasploit penetration testing tool creator HD Moore joins  
Rapid7, commercial Metasploit products to come
Oct 21, 2009 | 09:00 AM

By Kelly Jackson Higgins

http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability_management/security/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220800067
Vulnerability management vendor Rapid7 has purchased the popular open- 
source Metasploit penetration testing tool project and named  
Metasploit founder HD Moore as chief security officer of the company.

Moore, who is synonymous with the Metasploit Project , will continue  
as chief architect of Metasploit in his new role at Rapid7, and with  
an initial team of five Rapid7 researchers dedicated to the open- 
source project, some of whom already have been regular contributors to  
Metasploit. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Rapid7 plans to enhance its NeXpose vulnerability management product  
line and its own penetration testing services with Metasploit  
technology. The details on how Rapid7 -- which uses Metasploit in its  
penetration testing engagements -- will productize Metasploit are  
still being ironed out: Corey Thomas, vice president of products and  
operations at Rapid7, says he expects Rapid7 to keep Metasploit as a  
separate product with "high integration" with its existing products.  
"But this is all conjecture at this time," he says.

The goal is to leverage Metasploit's exploit technology to help  
identify which vulnerabilities discovered by NeXpose are actually  
exploitable, according to Thomas. "One of the things our customers  
have been pushing us for is how to get better data and information  
about their risk," he says. "And exploits are the key to that."

Either way, the potential for a commercial version of Metasploit  
represents a major shift in the penetration testing market, where  
vendors such as Core Security and Immunity Inc. have offered more user- 
friendly tools for enterprises.

Moore says the Rapid7 acquisition of Metasploit gives the project full- 
time resources -- Moore and his co-developers of Metasploit  
traditionally have done their work on the tool after-hours, during  
lunch breaks, and over weekends. "We are pretty competitive with Core  
and Immunity based on exploit coverage and features. But this is a  
great way to push the project forward ... and kick ass in the  
commercial sector if we want to go in that direction," Moore says.

This also will speed up turnaround of new features in Metasploit, he  
says. "It's night and day. I can now get a feature done in a business  
day, not over an entire weekend ... I'm excited to be able to work on  
this full-time."

Metasploit will also now have Rapid7's vast lab resources, and the  
ability to get more exposure for the project, he says, and expand the  
opportunities for existing Metasploit contributors as well.

Both Moore and Rapid7 say they are well aware of previous open-source  
and commercial marriages that have gone south, however, such as the  
Nessus scanning tool, which went from an open-source to a proprietary,  
closed-source license under Tenable Network Security. They say they  
are focusing on the open source community to leverage Metasploit. "Our  
goal is to make sure we improve the open-source" element, Thomas says.  
"Metasploit will remain open source."

"My goal is if we decide to go commercial, all the features and  
components are going into open-source" Metasploit as well, Moore says.

"We started talking to HD and the Metasploit Project folks a few  
months ago about how to tie in the exploit data [with our products and  
offerings]," Rapid7's Thomas says. "How could we invest and contribute  
to the Project over time for a more robust database [of exploits] at  
our disposal ... We want to use high-quality exploit data to help  
prioritize risk and get better insight into which attacks are most  
likely," for example, he says.

Moore says the combination of Metasploit's exploits and Rapid7's  
vulnerability reports would go "a lot further than any tool in the  
market" today in vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.