Meterpreter is by far one of the most powerful and most advanced payloads included in the Metasploit Framework. It's been the joy of penetration testers and the bane of incident responders and until now, it's only been a payload targeted at Windows systems, while Mac users have dodged a bullet. But that won't be the case for much longer, as demonstrated by Dino Dai Zovi in a 20-minute breakout session at Black Hat today titled "Macsploitation with Meterpreter."Dino demoed a Mac version of Meterpreter written by Charlie Miller and himself (both well known for their domination of the CanSecWest Pwn2Own contest). It provides similar functionality found in the Windows version, allowing interactive sessions and general mayhem -- all while staying in memory. Dino said the Mac version of Meterpreter would be released soon, but at this stage it's currently sitting on his laptop waiting to be cleaned up and sent to HD Moore for inclusion in Metasploit.

The release reminds us that with any security tool, it can be used for good and evil. From the defender's standpoint, Meterpreter is pure evil. If Meterpreter stays in memory and doesn't touch the disk, then what evidence will you have of what an attacker did? Peter Silberman and Steve Davis have an answer by Metasploit Forensic Framework or MSFF) that pulls out artifacts found in memory that show what the attacker did through a Meterpreter session.

This MSFF very powerful and a huge step forward for incident responders and forensic investigators...provided they acquire memory during the IR process. The downside is that Peter said HD Moore would be releasing an update on Sunday that defeats their tool, but they would be looking into how to get around the upcoming protections.

Keep an eye out for upcoming features such as Metaphish, which is being discussed this afternoon.

John H. Sawyer is a senior security engineer on the IT Security Team at the University of Florida. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are his own and do not represent the views and opinions of the UF IT Security Team or the University of Florida. When John's not fighting flaming, malware-infested machines or performing autopsies on blitzed boxes, he can usually be found hanging with his family, bouncing a baby on one knee and balancing a laptop on the other. Special to Dark Reading.