Author Archives: Alexander Leonov

About Alexander Leonov

Hi! My name is Alexander and I am a Vulnerability Management specialist. You can read more about me here. Currently, the best way to follow me is my Telegram channel @avleonovcom. I update it more often than this site. If you haven't used Telegram yet, give it a try. It's great. You can discuss my posts or ask questions at @avleonovchat. А всех русскоязычных я приглашаю в ещё один телеграмм канал @avleonovrus, первым делом теперь пишу туда.

Qualys new look and new products

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Qualys new look and new products. As you all know, it’s Black Hat 2017 time. This year Qualys seems to be the main newsmaker among Vulnerability Management vendors. Qualys Team renewed logo and website, updated marketing strategy, presented two new products: CloudView and CertView. I decided to take a look.

New Qualys Logo

Talking about design, I liked the old logo more. I don’t see “Q” here. Mirrored “9” maybe. 🙂 However, I did not like the blue nut of Tenable before and now it looks right and familiar.

Site design was also changed and simplified. I really liked well-structured qualys.com, where and every scan mode (“Cloud Apps”) had it’s own color and icon.

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Automated posting on Vkontakte public pages using VK API and Python

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Automated posting on Vkontakte public pages using VK API and Python. Vk.com (Vkontakte) is the most popular social network Russia and Ex-USSR with 430+ million users. Traditional advantages of vk.com – huge amount of free music and video. The service allows users to upload and share files and for a long time was quite tolerant to piracy. In 2016 Mail.Ru Group, Vkontakte parent company, has solved all problems with major music labels and  now works closely with the rights holders.

VKontakte has very efficient features for creating communities: public pages (blogs) and groups (open and closed web-forums). In VK communities you can easily share news, photo, audio, video, text files in different formats, create discussions topics and wiki-pages. When I was studying at the University in 2003-2009, to share information in a study group we needed to create our own website and phpBB-based forum. Now practically all students simply use VKontakte groups for this. VKontakte shows all content in groups as is, without hiding and filtering.

With reach automation capabilities, you can do various interesting things based on VK. For a start, I decided to post all annotations from my https://avleonov.com blog to https://vk.com/avleonovcom Vkontakte page. I created this page in web GUI and filled it with content automatically using my own python scripts.

Creating a new application

I want to work with Vkontakte from my Python scripts. So, I will need to create a new Standalone Application for this. You can do it here: https://vk.com/editapp?act=create

vk new application

Upd. March 2018 Integration with Vkontakte suddenly broke, because they added mandatory version parameter to all calls.

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Petya, M.E.Doc and the problem of trust

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Petya, M.E.Doc and the problem of trust. I’ve already mentioned in “Petya the Great and why *they* don’t patch vulnerabilities“, that NotPetya ransomware seems trivial from Vulnerability Management point of view. It uses known Windows vulnerabilities, that were patched by Microsoft long time ago.

Despite of this, I was really interested in M.E.Doc (servers were confiscated by Ukrainian police and website is not operational) role in the initial phase of malware spreading. In my opinion, we have a pretty interesting example of an attack vector, that will be very hard to detect and mitigate. And moreover, it’s once again shows that protected perimeter won’t be a panacea anymore.

m.e.doc

M.E.Doc – My Electronic Document Circulation System. “m.e.doc” sounds like the word, that mean “honey” in Russian and Ukrainian. That’s why all these bees in promo materials.

M.E.Doc is an Document Circulation System very popular in Ukraine. It makes possible to send reports to the government authorities in electronic form. It can be used in any organization. I can even imagine situation when usage of this kind of software may be even mandatory. Now the researchers [Eset, Dr.Web] say that M.E.Doc servers sent updates with backdoors  to the customers.

This backdoor has abilities:

  • Data collection for accessing mail servers
  • Arbitrary commands execution in the infected system
  • Running any executables
  • Downloading arbitrary files to the infected computer
  • Uploading arbitrary files to a remote server
  • Identify the exact organization using EDRPOU number.

I don’t really care about technical details about this backdoor. For me it’s enough that malicious code was on official server of the vendor and was spread to legitimate customers. Boom!

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Adding third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS

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Adding third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS. If you want to develop nasl plugins for OpenVAS, you might be interested how to import them in scanner. So, I was also interested.

First of all, I decided to copy one of existing nasl scripts. I chose script that successfully detected vulnerability on a target host. Thus, in the case of importing error, I would know for sure that it’s not because of syntax errors in script, but, for example, because non-existing plugin signature.

I scanned target CentOS host, chose and copied script file, changed id of the script (oid) and script title, rebuilt database. Then I rescanned target host.

CESA edited

As you can see, new script is also in results. Pretty straightforward.

CESA edited description

Now, let’s review the actual commands.

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Petya the Great and why *they* don’t patch vulnerabilities

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Petya the Great and why *they* don’t patch vulnerabilities. I really like this. Just imagine. Quiet, routine, everyday Vulnerability Management process in organizations: scanning-patching, scanning-patching, scanning-patching… And then. Suddenly! PEEETYYA!!!

And at very same moment everything changes. People from different companies start to communicate with each other actively, reverse this new malware, share the data, write and share tools for detection and recovery. Security professional is a friend, a brother and a source of useful information for security professional. Real movement! Real community! =)

Petya ransomware

For example, my friends from Vulners.com created pretty popular gist about Petya (petrWrap, notPetya, GoldenEye) and updated in real time for several hours.

Vulners Petya gist

My former colleagues from Positive Technologies released detailed technical review of this ransomware (in Russian) few hours since the outbreak started, at 01:00 am . They also found a local kill switch, and probably were the first one. Simultaneously with Amit Serper from Cybereason.

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Vulners Cloud Agents for Vulnerability Management

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Vulners Cloud Agents for Vulnerability Management. A very good news! Vulners Team is ready to present complete functionality for vulnerability audit. And it’s not just an Audit API that you have to use somehow in your own scripts, but an enterprise ready product, like agent-based vulnerability scanning in Qualys and Tenable.

IP Summary

You can try it for free. Let’s see how to do it. For example we have a CentOS 7 server and we want to see vulnerabilities of this host in Vulners.

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GSM Community Edition and lagging OpenVAS Plugin Feed

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GSM Community Edition and lagging OpenVAS Plugin Feed. As I already wrote in “Installing OpenVAS 9 from the sources“, since May 2017 OpenVAS 9 is available in a form of free virtual appliance. It is called GSM Community Edition (GCE) and is based on Greenbone commercial product GSM ONE.

What’s the difference between GSM ONE and free GCE? GSM Community Edition uses different Community Feed of NASL plugins, it can’t be updated automatically and does not have some management features. The most important, in my opinion, is that it does not support OpenVAS Management Protocol (OMP), API for managing scanners. Only HTTPS for WebGUI and SSH are available.

GSM start screen

Talking about different NASL plugin feeds, I need to mention recent message by Jan-Oliver Wagner in Openvas-announce list.

That seems like Greenbone is rather tired of developing OpenVAS by themselves and watching how other companies use theirs engine and feeds, positioning themselves as an “alternative to Greenbone’s product at a better price”. So, they decided:

  1. “OpenVAS NVT Feed” will be renamed to “Greenbone Community Feed”
  2. Public access to the “openvas-nvts” SVN repository will be forbidden, but the license of nasl plugins won’t be changed.
  3. Now Community Feed lags 14 days from commercial feed, but Greenbone would like to make an actual feed, but without some features for enterprise customers.

I really care about Greenbone and they, of course, do as they think is better for the company and OpenVAS community, but at the same time it reminds me situation with Tenable and Nessus. Maybe not so radical. But definitely in the same direction.

Feed delayed for 2 week can’t be used effectively for obvious reasons. If you see exploitation of critical vulnerability like WannaCry in the wild and will need to wait 2 weeks to check your infrastructure, it’s a nonsense! 🙂 That’s mean that you just can’t rely on OpenVAS anymore. And if you use it, you should think about migration on commercial solution, for example on Greenbone’s GSM, or think about getting actual plugin feed somewhere else.

The good thing, it might show customers once again that knowledge base of Vulnerability Management solution is important and stimulate other security content developers to make own nasl scripts and feeds.

But let’s go back to GSM Community Edition. Detailed description of installation process you can find on official site. I will just describe my own experience.

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