Moore developed security software utilities for the United States Department of Defense as a teenager, and founded the Metasploit Projectin the summer of 2003 with the goal of becoming a public resource for exploit code research and development. He is known for his work in WarVOX, AxMan, the Metasploit Decloaking Engine and the Rogue Network Link Detection Tools., and started a "Month of Browser Bugs" initiative in 2006 as an experiment in fast-paced vulnerability discovery with full disclosure. This started the Month of Bugs project meme, and resulted a number of web browserpatches and improved security measures. Moore has discovered, or been involved in the discovery of, a number of critical security vulnerabilities.
Metasploit Framework
The Metasploit Framework is a development platform for creating security tools and exploits. The framework is used by network security professionals to perform penetration testing, system administrators to verify patch installations, product vendors to perform regression testing, and security researchers worldwide. The framework is written in the Ruby programming language and includes components written in C and assembly language. In October 2009, the Metasploit project was acquired by Rapid7. While the Metasploit Framework continues to be free, Rapid7 has added a commercial edition called Metasploit Express. With the acquisition of the project, HD Moore became Chief Security Officer at Rapid7 while remaining Chief Architect of Metasploit.
WarVOX
WarVOX is a software suite for exploring, classifying, and auditing telephone systems. Unlike normal wardialing tools, WarVOX processes the raw audio from each call and does not use a modem directly. This model allows WarVOX to find and classify a wide range of interesting lines, including modems, faxes, voice mail boxes, PBXs, loops, dial tones, IVRs, and forwarders using signal processing techniques.
AxMan
AxMan is an ActiveXfuzzing engine. The goal of AxMan is to discover vulnerabilities in COM objects exposed through Internet Explorer. Since AxMan is web-based, any security changes in the browser will also affect the results of the fuzzing process.
Metasploit Decloaking Engine
The Metasploit Decloaking Engine is a system for identifying the real IP address of a web user, regardless of proxy settings, using a combination of client-side technologies and custom services. No vulnerabilities are exploited by this tool. A properly configured Tor setup should not result in any identifying information being exposed.
Rogue Network Link Detection Tools
The Rogue Network Link Detection Tools are designed to detect unauthorized outbound network links on large corporate networks. These tools send spoofed TCP SYN and ICMP Echo Requests with the original destination IP encoded into the packet, which can then be read back out by an external listening host.
Criticism
Moore's work has gained him both praise and antagonism in the industry. Companies such as Microsoft have credited him with discovering vulnerabilities, yet there has been criticism of Metasploit and similar tools due to their capacity to be used for criminal purposes instead of just offensive security and some of that criticism has fallen upon Moore himself. Moore has been warned by US law enforcement about his involvement in the Critical.IO scanning project. According to Moore, though, "We're always chasing the bad guys – the good guys are never ahead. We're not the ones who wrote these exploits. They are often found in the wild and the defenders are generally following the black hats."
