Metasploit acquired by Rapid7

David Heath
Friday, 23 October 2009 07:11

Business IT - Security

Announced yesterday, the Metasploit project is to be absorbed by security company Rapid7.

HD Moore, creator of the Metasploit project announced the acquisition in his blog yesterday.  In the posting, he announced the take over and also the employment of Moore as Chief Security Officer at Rapid7 and Chief Architect of Metasploit.  In addition another core developer, Egypt, will also joining Rapid7.  A further 3 positions are also to be filled.

A FAQ details some of the salient facts of the  takeover, confirming that Metasploit will remain open source under the existing license.

One of the key questions is why?  The FAQ deals with that: "Rapid7's core focus is around securing electronic infrastructure from attack. Successful security requires equal understanding and capabilities of both offensive and defensive security best practices. Metasploit gives Rapid7 access and collaboration with one of the largest, most sophisticated security researcher communities in the world."

Moore also notes in his blog entry: "Rapid7 was the right company for Metasploit for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they understand the value of the community have seen the benefits that funding a project like Metasploit can provide since our first conversation. Second, the management team at Rapid7 is made up of some brilliant folks. They may not be exploit developers, but they understand business and how to make a marriage with Metasploit increase their own bottom line without destroying the value of project in the process. Third, Rapid7 has an amazing technical staff and a solid vulnerability management product. There are only a few companies in the world that understand how much work is involved in doing vulnerability assessments right, and this team has been doing it for over 9 years. Lastly, Rapid7 has an enormous QA lab, with the ability to perform regression testing across a massive array of operating systems and patch levels. The combination of their staff and technical resources will allow the Metasploit Framework to make a huge leap ahead in the coming months."

Let's hope for bigger and better things from Metasploit as the project gathers all these additional resources.