Rapid7 has announced that it has acquired Velociraptor. The organisation develops the open-source platform of the same name for cybersecurity monitoring. It is not known how was paid for the acquisition.
Velociraptor, not to be confused with the hard drives, is a platform that was founded by former Google employee Mike Cohen. At Google, he built tools to support the incident response team, including Google Rapid Response. Velociraptor is an open-source project that allows response teams to scan thousands of hosts for possible attacks in a few minutes. With this, such attacks should surface even before the damage is done, preventing the victim from being inoperational for hours or even weeks.
Contributions to the project
The company plans to invest heavily in Velociraptor, both by contributing to the growth of the community and by building events, projects, engagement, contributions and more. The company also plans to incorporate the Velociraptor Project into its own Rapid7 Insight platform so that Rapid7 customers can also access the technology and community surrounding Velociraptor. Rapid7 has no plans to commercialise Velociraptor beyond the integration with its own Insight platform.
Integrations with Insight
Currently, Velociraptor’s endpoint data collection capabilities are already incorporated into Insight. This allows MDR teams to spend less time monitoring their environments and respond more immediately to incidents. Based on Velicoraptor VLQ queries, MDR teams can actively search for suspicious behaviour and trigger automatic responses when serious situations occur on endpoints.
Fan of open source
Rapid7 says it is a big fan of open-source software and the communities around it. It would lead to a faster time-to-market, more innovation and improved productivity. The company has invested in open source projects before, such as when it took over Metassploit twelve years ago. The company also founded the platforms AtackerKB and Recog.
Users interested in trying out Velociraptor can visit the project’s GitHub page.
Tip: Microsoft and McAfee are part of a new Ransomware Task Force