Attackers are apparently zigging when we thought they would be zagging again. An article posted yesterday talks about how attackers have passed on using the exploits published by the common frameworks and instead, have been pretty widely using a more advanced, capable and less known tool to exploit the DNS vulnerabilities that have been in the news for the last few weeks.

In the article, HD Moore, a well known security professional (and author of Metasploit), discusses how the attackers seem to be bypassing the exploit that he and his team published and instead have been using another exploit to perform illicit attacks. In fact, the attackers used their own private exploit to attack the Breakingpoint company that Moore works for during the day. I was very interested in this approach by the attackers, and it seems almost ironic somehow, that they have bypassed the popular Metasploit tool exploits for one of their own choosing.

This is interesting to me because when an exploit appears in Metasploit, one would assume that it will be widely used by attackers. Metasploit, after all, makes advanced attacks and compromise techniques pretty much “click and drool” for even basic attackers. Thus, when an exploit appears there, many in the security community see that as a turning point in the exploitability of an attack – meaning that it becomes widely available for mischief. However, in this case, the availability of the Metasploit exploit was not a major factor in the attacks. Widespread attacks are still not common, even as targeted attacks using a different exploit has begun. Does this mean that the attacker community has turned its back on Metasploit?

The answer is probably no. A significant number of attackers are likely to continue to use Metasploit to target their victims. Our HoneyPoint deployments see plenty of activity that can be traced back to the popular exploit engine. Maybe, in this case, the attackers who were seriously interested had a better mechanism available to them. Among our team there is speculation that some of the private, “black market” exploit frameworks may be stepping up their quality and effectiveness. These “exploits for sale” authors may be increasing their skills and abilities in order to ensure that their work retains value as more and more open source or FREE exploit frameworks emerge into the market place. After all, they face the same issues as any other software company – they have to have high value in order to compete effectively with low cost. For exploit sellers this means more zero-day exploits, more types of evasion, more options for post-exploitation and higher quality of the code they generate.

In some ways, tools like Metasploit help the security community by giving security teams exploitation capabilities on par with basic attackers. In other ways, perhaps they also hurt the security effort by enabling more basic attackers to do complex work and by driving up the quality and speed of exploit availability on the black market. It is hard to argue that such black market efforts would not be present anyway as the attackers strive to compete amongst themselves, but you have to wonder if Metasploit and tools like it serve to speed up the pace.

There will always be tools available to attackers. If they aren’t widely available, then they will be available to a specific few. The skills to create attack tools are no longer the arcane knowledge known to a small circle of security mystics that they were a decade ago. Vendors and training companies have sliced and diced the skills into a myriad of books, classes, training sessions, conventions and other mechanisms in order to “monetize” their dissemination. As such, there are many many many more folks with the skills needed to develop attack tools, code exploits and create malware that has ever increasing capability.

This all comes back to the idea that in today’s environment, keeping anything secret, is nearly impossible. The details of the DNS vulnerability were doomed to be known even as they were being initially discovered. There are just too many smart people with skills to keep security issues private when there is any sort of disclosure to the public. There are too many parties interested in making a name, gaining some fame or turning a buck to have any chance at keeping vulnerabilities secret. I am certainly not a fan of total non-disclosure, but we have to assume that even some level of basic public knowledge will eventually equal full disclosure. We also have to remember, in the future, that the attacker pool is wider and deeper than ever before and that given those capabilities, they may well find mechanisms and tools that are beyond what we expect. They may reject the popular wisdom of “security pundits from the blogosphere” and surprise us all. After all, that is what they do – surf the edges and perform in unexpected ways – it just seems that some of us security folks may have forgotten it….