Category Archives: API

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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getsploit from Vulners.com

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getsploit from Vulners.com. Kirill Isox Ermakov, the founder of Vulners, has recently presented a new open-source tool for searching and downloading exploits – getsploit.

Let’s say we want to pentest some WordPress blog. For example, this website avleonov.com. We can get WordPress version simply using curl:

$ curl -s https://avleonov.com | grep "generator"
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 4.7.1" />

Ok, let’s get some sploits using this version:

$ sudo apt-get install git
$ git clone https://github.com/vulnersCom/getsploit
Cloning into 'getsploit'...
remote: Counting objects: 32, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (21/21), done.
remote: Total 32 (delta 13), reused 30 (delta 11), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (32/32), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
$ cd getsploit/
$ ./getsploit.py "title:WordPress AND title:4.7.1"

getsploit

As you can see on the screen shot, getsploit makes a search request to vulners.com: bulletinFamily:exploit AND title:WordPress AND title:4.7.1 and matches objects in Immunity Canvas, DSquare Exploit Pack, Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Packet Storm, Malware exploit database, SAINTexploit™, seebug.org, Vulnerability Lab, 0day.today and Zero Science Lab.

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Tracking software versions using Nessus and Splunk

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Tracking software versions using Nessus and Splunk. Let’s say you have already exported scan results from Nessus or Tenable SecurityCenter to Splunk using HTTP event connector, or in some other way. And you see that some critical software vulnerability was published. For example, this month Jira critical vulnerability. How to find out, do we have vulnerable servers in our infrastructure or not?

Nessus plus Splunk

Of course we can start a new Nessus scan to detect vulnerable hosts. However, Nessus plugin for this particular vulnerability may be released with a big latency and you will not find this vulnerability in your scans. So, it’s may be faster just to search for detected Jira servers in available scan results using Splunk searching mechanism.

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Selenium, SikuliX and Social Network posting

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Selenium, SikuliX and Social Network posting. The last post was about SikuliX. It’s fair to say that it’s not optimal for web applications automation. For such applications, it’s better to use something, that will natively work with your web-browse. The first solution that comes to mind is, of course, Selenium.

Selenium is a portable software-testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without the need to learn a test scripting language.

This app is released under the Apache 2.0 license and is a very common tool for Quality Assurance (QA). It can be also used in Information Security. For example, you can upload Selenium scripts in Qualys WAS (Web Application Scanner)  to help scanner in performing some complex operations, for example in authentication on the website.

Selenium Upload script in Qualys

Selenium is available in a form of two products: Selenium WebDriver for some hardcore automation and web-browser plugin Selenium IDE, which will help you to create and run scripts. I chose Selenium IDE.

Selenium types

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Vulners.com and ranges of dates

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Vulners.com and ranges of dates. I have already wrote earlier how to automatically retrieve data from the Vulners.com vulnerability database: if you need objects of some particular type, it’s better use Collection API, if you want to get different types of objects using advanced queries, your choice is Search API v.3.

But what if we want to get, not all the objects, but only new or modified ones in a some date range? How can we do it in Vulners?

Vulners.com date ranges

Search queries

Each object in Vulners (vulnerability, patch, bulletin, etc.) has a publication date, and modification date. You can see it if you open some Vulners object in json format, for example CVE-2017-6301:

        "published": "2017-02-23T23:59:00",
        "modified": "2017-02-24T14:45:17",

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SikuliX: the last chance for automation

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SikuliX: the last chance for automation. This post I will publish in the API section of my blog. However, it is about the situation when there application has no API. Let’s suppose that we have to use in our work some graphical application or web-service. And unfortunately we need constantly repeat some very routine and annoying operations in it. This often happens if the application developers have not thought enough about the real-life cases their end-users will deal with. What can we do in such scenario?

  • First of all, look maybe there is an open and documented API
  • If there is no API, and it is an installed application, maybe you can use it in a console mode
  • If it is a web-service, maybe you can figure out how it works and how to automate it using tools like Firebug

But sometimes it is impossible to do anything at all. And it is even more sad, if this routine task is really elementary and you can easily explain the logic: what menu to choose, what button to push, where you should enter text and so on.

At this point, you just spit on all and use your last resort – SikuliX.

SikuliX Script window

With this tool, you can automate everything. It doesn’t matter if it is a web-service or a GUI application, what operating system it uses and so on. That’s all because SikuliX is working at the highest level. In fact, it just makes screenshots, analyses them as images, trying to find graphical elements that it should somehow use.

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Automated task processing with JIRA API

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Automated task processing with JIRA API. It’s no secret that task tracker is one of the most critical resources of any big organization. The whole working process can be represented as creating, processing and closing various tasks. Without task tracker there will be complete disaster, collapse and anarchy. So, it’s very important to work with this instrument efficiently. And when I write efficiently, I mean in automated way. It’s a blog about security automation after all. 😉

This post will be about Jira task tracker. I have already wrote how Jira can be used in VM Remediation process. That post was mainly about the main principles and how remediation tasks look in Jira WEB-GUI. Now, I will go further and show how to use it as a source of important information and easily deal with daily routine tasks using some trivial scripting. It is all possible because of advanced Jira Rest API.

Let’s say we have some regular tasks of some type. For example, to detect vulnerabilities on some hosts using Nessus and make a comment about founded vulnerabilities in the task. You can make a script that we will search for this kind of tasks in Jira, process them, add scan results to the comment and close the task. Of course it works the best when these tasks are also were created with in some automated way, in this case parsing will be much easier.

“Issue”, is the right name for the task in Jira; but I frequently use “issue”, “task” and “ticket” interchangeably. Sorry for this.

So, we need to take this steps:

  • Authorization
  • Search for existing Jira issues using some search request
  • View description, data and comments of the issue
  • Download files attached to the issue
  • Make some task processing
  • Add a new comment to the issue
  • Change status of the issue

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