Category Archives: Concept

Packabit project: building Nmap deb packages for Ubuntu

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During the long New Year holidays (30 dec – 8 jan) I started a new project: Vagrant-based Linux package builder called Packabit. I thought it might be nice to have scripts that will automatically build a Linux packages from sources and will NOT litter main system with unnecessary packages. Something like a very simplified build server.

Packabit - Vagrant-based Linux package builder

Why might someone want to build Linux packages on their own?

Official repositories of Linux distros usually contain pretty old versions of packages. Let’s take, for example, Nmap. The only version of Nmap available in the repository for Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS is 7.60 , and the latest stable version of Nmap available on official website is 7.70.

Release dates according Nmap changelog:

  • Nmap 7.70 [2018-03-20]
  • Nmap 7.60 [2017-07-31]

The latency is more than a year.

Is it really necessary to use the latest version? Actually, yes. Every new version of Nmap contain more banner detects and service detects and produce more adequate results. Nmap project offers official packages only for RPM-based distributions: CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, etc. And if you need packages for DEB-based distributions, Debian, Ubuntu, Kali, etc. you should build them yourself.

What is the Packabit?

Currently it’s just 2 bash scripts for building stable Nmap package for Ubuntu 18.04: one is for creation and launching Vagrant virtual machine, the other runs on guest virtual machine and build Nmap package from the sources.

How to try it

I want this project to be as opensource as possible. If anyone wants to give it a try, get it from Github. For the end-user it looks like this: run the script build_nmap.sh, wait for 10 minutes and get new package from the packages directory. There won’t be any litter in a process. Each time a new virtual machine for building will be automatically created and then destroyed.

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MIPT/PhysTech guest lecture: Vulnerabilities, Money and People

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On December 1, I gave a lecture at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (informally known as PhysTech). This is a very famous and prestigious university in Russia. In Soviet times, it trained personnel for Research Institutes and Experimental Design Bureaus, in particular for the Soviet nuclear program.

MIPT open lecture about vulnerabilities

Nowadays MIPT closely cooperates with Russian and foreign companies, trains business people, software developers and great scientists. For example, the researchers who discovered Graphene and won Nobel Prize for this in 2010 were once MIPT graduates.

This is a very interesting place with a rich history. So it was a great honor for me to speak there.

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Guinea Pig and Vulnerability Management products

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IMHO, security vendors use the term “Vulnerability Management” extremely inaccurate. Like a guinea pig, which is not a pig and is not related to Guinea, the current Vulnerability Management products are not about the actual (practically exploitable) vulnerabilities and not really about the management.

Guinea Pig and Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability should mean something solid and reliable, something that can be practically used by a malicious attacker or penetration tester.

When (so-called) Vulnerability Management vendors start working with indirect information from third-party about potential vulnerabilities in the software, that were possibly exploited by someone in some unknown conditions, or simply distance from responsibility: “we just provide information from the software vendor; software vendor knows better about the vulnerabilities in his own products”, it’s all falling into to the area of fortune telling and counting angels on the head of a pin.

Hardcore process of identifying weaknesses that real-life attackers can use moves to a boring compliance. For example, as PCI DSS requires, there should be no vulnerabilities above medium level (CVSS Base score > 4). At the same time, no one cares how fair this assessment of criticality is or how real these vulnerabilities are. All the analytics build on such formal data loses its sharpness and practical value.

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PRYTEK meetup: Breach and Attack Simulation or Automated Pentest?

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Last Tuesday, November 27, I spoke at “Business Asks for Cyber Attacks” meetup organized by PRYTEK investment platform. The event was held at the PRYTEK Moscow office in a beautiful XIX century building of a former textile manufactory.

PRYTEK Breach and Attack Simulation meetup

The goal of the meetup was to talk about new approaches in Vulnerability Analysis and how they can reduce the Information Security costs for organizations.

There were two presentations:

  • The first one was by Doron Sivan, Cronus CEO. He talked about his company’s product.
  • The second was mine. I criticized traditional vendors of vulnerability scanners, talked about things that work in companies, and things that don’t work, and what you should pay attention to when choosing a Vulnerability Management tool.

For the most part this was my report from the last ISACA VM Meetup. The only difference was in the conclusions, since the topic of this event and the audience were different.

I stressed that the Attack Simulation tools, like Cronus, that analyze vulnerabilities and network connectivity of hosts can be very helpful. They allow you to assess the criticality of each vulnerability better and help to justify the need in prompt patching for IT Team (see “Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation“).

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Making Vulnerable Web-Applications: XXS, RCE, SQL Injection and Stored XSS ( + Buffer Overflow)

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In this post I will write some simple vulnerable web applications in python3 and will show how to attack them. This is all for educational purposes and for complete beginners. So please don’t be too hard on me. 😉

Vulnerability Examples

As a first step I will create a basic web-application using twisted python web server (you can learn more about it in “Making simple Nmap SPA web GUI with Apache, AngularJS and Python Twisted“).

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Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation

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In my opinion, Remediation is the most difficult part of Vulnerability Management process. If you know the assets in your organization and can assess them, you will sooner or later produce a good enough flow of critical vulnerabilities. But what the point, if the IT team will not fix them?

Kübler-Ross model and Tsunami of Vulnerability Tasks

Kübler-Ross model and Tsunami of Vulnerability Remediation Tasks

Just think about it. The only thing that your colleagues from  IT team see is an unexpected  tsunami of the patching tasks. They most likely don’t understand WHY they should do it. They most likely don’t know about the concepts of Attack Surface minimization and Attack Cost maximization. From their point of view it’s just some stupid requirements from InfoSec team imposed with only one goal – to make their life miserable.

So, they may think that denial and pushing back can solve all their problems. And, frankly, this may work. There are countless ways to sabotage Vulnerability Remediation. Most main and common are the following:

  • I don’t understand how to patch this.
  • I already patched this, there should be a false positive in the scanner.
  • Why should we patch this? The vulnerability is not exploitable. Or it is exploitable in theory, but not exploitable in our particular infrastructure. Or this server is not critical and, even if it will be compromised, there won’t be a huge impact. So, we will not patch it.

In each individual case Vulnerability Analyst can describe and proof his point, but doing this for each vulnerability will require insane amount of time and efforts and will paralyze the work. It is basically the Italian strike or work-to-rule.

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Asset Inventory for Internal Network: problems with Active Scanning and advantages of Splunk

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In the previous post, I was writing about Asset Inventory and Vulnerability Scanning on the Network Perimeter. Now it’s time to write about the Internal Network.

Typical IT-infrastructure of a large organization

I see a typical IT-infrastructure of a large organization as monstrous favela, like Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. At the beginning it was probably wisely designed, but for years it  was highly effected by spontaneous development processes in various projects as well as multiple acquisitions. And now very few people in the organization really understand how it all works and who owns each peace.

There is a common belief that we can use Active Network Scanning for Asset Inventory in the organization. Currently, I’m not a big fan of this approach, and I will try to explain here the disadvantages of this method and mention some alternatives.

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