Monthly Archives: February 2018

Masking Vulnerability Scan reports

Continuing the series of posts about Kenna (“Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data“, “Connectors and REST API“) and similar services. Is it actually safe to send your vulnerability data to some external cloud service for analysis? Leakage of such information can potentially cause great damage to your organization, right?

Masking Vulnerability Scans

It’s once again a problem of trust to vendor. IMHO, in some cases it may make sense to hide the real hostnames and ip-addresses of the target hosts in scan reports. So, it would be clear for analysis vendor that some critical vulnerability exists somewhere, but it would not be clear where exactly.

To do this, each hostname/ip-address should be replaced to some values of similar type and should be replaced on the same value each time. So the algorithms of Kenna-like service could work with this masked reports. This mean that we need to create a replacement dictionary.

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Tenable University: Nessus Certificate of Proficiency

Yesterday I finished “Nessus Certificate of Proficiency” learning plan at Tenable University and passed the final test. Here I would like to share my impressions.

Nessus Certificate test completed

First of all, few words about my motivation. I use Nessus literally every day at work. So, it was fun to check my knowledge. I already wrote about Tenable education portal in “Study Vulnerability Assessment in Tenable University for free” post. It’s free. It’s available for everyone on demand. However, Tenable customers get access to way more content.

At this moment there are four learning plan available for Tenable customers: for Nessus, Tenable.io, SecurityCenter and SecurityCenter Continuous View. Each learning plan consist of short video lessons grouped in courses and the final test.

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Kenna Security: Connectors and REST API

In the last post about Kenna Security cloud service I mentioned their main features for analyzing data from different vulnerability scanners. Now let’s see how to import Tenable Nessus scan results in Kenna. Here you can see the list of connectors for all supported products:

Kenna connectors

Three connectors for Nessus are available:

  • Nessus Importer retrieves existing scan results from your Nessus server.
  • Nessus Scanner can schedule scans on your Nessus server.
  • Nessus XML imports xml (.Nessus2) files.

First two connectors work with Nessus server directly. And they probably won’t work anymore with Nessus Professional 7, because of API removing (see “New Nessus 7 Professional and the end of cost-effective Vulnerability Management (as we knew it)“). If Nessus server is deployed on-premise you should use special Kenna Virtual Tunnel.

Last “Nessus XML” connector is the most flexible. No matter how you got your scan results, it will be possible to import them to Kenna. See how to get XML reports from from Nessus server in a post “Retrieving scan results through Nessus API“.  You can upload XML scan results using Kenna web GUI (not very efficient way, but for testing – why not?) or REST API.

To use Kenna REST API you will need an Application Token. Go to the the Settings menu -> Applications:

Kenna settings

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Nessus Manager disappeared and Tenable.io On-Prem was announced

If you open Tenable Products page right now you will not see Nessus Manager there anymore.  Nessus Manager page “The Power of Nessus for Teams” was also deleted.

Tenable products

However, it is still mentioned in the product comparison. Agent-Based Scanning in SecurityCenter and SecurityCenter Continuous View “* Requires Tenable.io Vulnerability Management or Nessus Manager for agent management.”

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Making simple Nmap SPA web GUI with Apache, AngularJS and Python Twisted

The last time I was developing dynamic web applications years ago. I used CGI and PHP back then. 🙂 Now I am really interested in a modern approach, when you have a Single Page Web Application (SPA) written in HTML and JavaScript, that makes http requests to some external API.

It’s pretty cool, because your application becomes API-centric naturally. You work on human interface and improve integration capabilities at the same time. And the task of securing your web app mostly reduces to securing your formalized API.

nmap SPA GUI

The very best way to learn something new is to write a post about this stuff. 😉 Here I will reproduce my own steps of making a very basic web app:

  1. Launch Apache web-server with http/https.
  2. Make a simple API service: Nmap wrapper.
  3. Make a web-application with “multipage” experience. There should be at least two pages: Scan and About.
  4. On Scan page it will be possible to input a target (hostname or IP), scan arguments and  launch scan by clicking on the button. The same behavior will be if the target will be passed as a parameter in address bar.
  5. On other pages should be some static text.

As you can see, it is a very limited task, but it should clear up the most confusing parts of the process.

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