Rapid7 launches Metasploit Express

When Rapid7 announced it was acquiring HD Moore’s hugely popular Metasploit tool late last year, many wondered if the integrity of the technology would be preserved.

Some things have changed. Moore, for example, could be seen at SOURCE Boston this week walking around in a suit and tie, which some saw as out of character. But on the technology side, the company appears intent on maintaining the tool’s integrity.

The vendor of unified vulnerability management, compliance and penetration testing tools said it would use Metasploit to enhance its NeXpose product. It also promised to “sponsor dedicated resources and contributions to the standalone, community-driven Metasploit Project to further its growth and success.”

This week, the company announced the latest step in that strategy with the unveiling of Metasploit Express, which it billed as an affordable, comprehensive and easier-to-use penetration testing tool for organizations with limited resources.

According the company’s official announcement, features include:

Comprehensive penetration testing capabilities. Based on the world’s largest tested and integrated public database of exploits and payloads, Metasploit Express runs exploits and detects and tests insecure configurations, such as weak passwords, the company said. Unlike other existing penetration testing solutions, Metasploit Express lets penetration testers examine trust relationships between systems for a more accurate risk profile. In addition to testing standard PCs and servers, the product can compromise a range of network devices and offer data collection and automation capabilities for such devices.

Affordable ease of use. Available at a price point that a broad range of security professionals in large corporations, consulting organizations and small business can leverage, Metasploit Express’ network penetration testing capabilities are enhanced by the product’s graphical user interface and the Metasploit Express Workflow Manager, an advanced workflow engine that provides a step-by-step model to simplify and accelerate testing programs and eliminates the burden of many manual processes found with traditional exploit attack platforms.

Fully integrated and open. Rapid7 said Express integrates with all editions of the company’s vulnerability management product, Rapid7 NeXpose, including the Community Edition, free vulnerability software for commercial use. Users can launch a NeXpose scan directly from within the Metasploit Express user interface and the vulnerability information from NeXpose is directly linked to the exploit data in Metasploit Express. As a result, Rapid7 said, users can detect vulnerabilities in their IT infrastructure and then use Metasploit Express to test for the ability to penetrate the vulnerabilities and launch an attack, decreasing the time to test and increasing the efficiency in real threat detection.

Continued support from and for the open source community. Rapid7 and the Metasploit Project are preparing for the release of version 3.4 of the Metasploit Framework, which will include improvements to the Meterpreter payload, the expansion of the framework’s brute-force capabilities and the complete overhaul of the back-end database schema and event subsystem. In addition, more than 60 exploit modules and 40 auxiliary modules will be added with version 3.4.

Metasploit Express 3.4 costs $3,000 per user per year and includes support with dedicated SLAs provided by Rapid7 staff. Metasploit Express 3.4 is due to ship next month.