Category Archives: Events

VMconf 22 Vulnerability Management conference: Call For Papers started

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about the VMconf 22 Vulnerability Management conference. CFP started on November 1, which will last a month and a half. So please submit your talk or share this video with someone who might be interested.

Let’s talk about the conference itself. All started with a post in my Telegram channel. I have looked at the listings of cybersecurity conferences and have not seen a global event dedicated entirely to Vulnerability Management.

Specialized conferences are mainly about SOC, DLP, AntiFraud, cryptography. Conferences with broad topics are aimed mainly at C-level executives or hardcore offensive specialists. Conferences are usually very regional. Of course, there are events organized by VM vendors, but their marketing goals are clear and there are usually no CFPs (Calls For Papers) at these events. In our COVID times, it has become much more difficult to attend offline events due to various restrictions.

So, it would be great to have our own independent international online Vulnerability Management event. From the community (in a very broad, global sense) and for the community. For interesting content and development of horizontal connections between people, not for marketing. And we will do it.

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Career Navigator talk for IT Hub College

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Last week I gave a “Career Navigator” talk for the students of the IT Hub College in Moscow. By the way, this college has a very interesting practical information security program. If it is relevant for you, check it out.

I’ve never talked so much about myself in public. It was like giving advises to yourself from the past. An interesting experience. It took about an hour and a half. And now I will try to mention the main points.

University

I talked about studying at the university. The fact that we go to university to gain knowledge and skills. But this is not the only reason. The university diploma makes it easier to find a job and participate in emigration programs if you ever want to. For example, this is a requirement for a for the European Blue Card. Networking at the university is also important.

My experience of studying at Bauman Moscow State Technical University was definitely positive. Although I believe that there could be more practical courses on Operating Systems, networking and programming. On the other hand, there could be much less mathematics. I have the best memories from the Theoretical Foundations of Information Security course and the course based on CISSP exam.

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AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 2: What was I talking about there

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Hello all! It is the second part about AM Live Vulnerability Management conference. In the first part I made the timecodes for the 2 hours video in Russian. Here I have combined all my lines into one text.

What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability Management process is the opposite of the admin’s saying “If it works – don’t touch it!”. The main idea of this process is to somehow fix the vulnerabilities. How do you achieve this is not so important. Maybe you will have a nice Plan-Do-Check-Act process and strict policies. Maybe not. The main thing is that you fix vulnerabilities! And the main problem is to negotiate this regular patching with system administrators and service owners.

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AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 1: Full video in Russian + Timecodes in English

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Hello all! 2 weeks ago I participated in the best online event fully dedicated to Vulnerability Management in Russia. It was super fun and exciting. Thanks to all the colleagues and especially to Lev Paley for the great moderation! I have talked out completely. Everything I wanted and the way I wanted. It seems that not a single hot topic was missed.

AM LIve: Vulnerability Management conference

You can see the two hours video below. It is in Russian. And it’s pretty complicated to translate it all. I won’t event try. ? If you don’t understand Russian you can try auto-generated and auto-translated subtitles on YouTube, but the quality is far from ideal.

To give you the idea what we were talking about I added the timecodes in English.

Timecodes

Section 1. Vulnerability Management Process and Solutions

  • 5:18 Vulnerability Management Process Definition
  • 10:53 Vulnerability Management is the opposite of the admin’s saying “If it works – don’t touch it!” The main thing in the process is to somehow fix the vulnerabilities. (Leonov)
  • 12:30 Sometimes a basic vulnerability scanner and Jira is already a Vulnerability Management solution (Leonov)
  • 13:30 Difference between Vulnerability Management Solutions and Vulnerability Scanners
  • 17:09 Vulnerability Management and Vulnerability Scanners: “in our restaurant we call rusks “croutons”, because a rusk cannot cost $8, but crouton can” (Leonov)
  • 23:00 Licensing schemes, delivery options and costs
  • 28:48 Module-based licensing and the situations when modules can be excluded from the subscription (Paley)
  • 30:24 Commercial Vulnerability Management solutions are expensive, especially when licensed per host (Leonov)
  • 31:00 Maxpatrol unlimited licenses (Bengin)
  • 34:08 Perimeter scanning: very critical, low reliability of banner-based detections, it’s better to assess hosts accessible from the Internet with internal authenticated scans. Criticality of the network as an element of scoring. (Leonov)
  • 36:50 The impact of Regulators on the Vulnerability Management Market, a free ScanOVAL tool
  • 39:10 What to do with vulnerabilities in local software products that are not supported by foreign VM vendors?
  • 44:00 When it’s enough to use a free scanner? Could there be a full-functional and free vulnerability scanner? In theory, yes, but it is not clear how the vendor will finance the maintenance of the knowledge base. In practice, we see how such stories collapse. You need to understand the limitations of free products (such as OpenVAS). Including the completeness of the scan results and the ease of building the VM process. (Leonov)
  • 47:19 Poll: what is used in your organization?
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CISO Forum 2019: Vulnerability Management, Red Teaming and a career in Information Security abroad

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Today, at the very end of 2019, I want to write about the event I attended in April. Sorry for the delay ?. This doesn’t mean that CISO Forum 2019 was not Interesting or I had nothing to share. Not at all! In fact, it was the most inspiring event of the year, and I wanted to make a truly monumental report about it. And I began to write it, but, as it usually happens, more urgent tasks and topics appeared, so the work eventually stopped until now.

The first discussion was about Offensive Security and Red Teams in particular

At CISO Forum 2019 I participated in two panel discussions. The first one was about Offensive Security and Red Teams in particular.

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PHDays 9: new methods of Vulnerability Prioritization in Vulnerability Management products

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On May 21, I spoke at the PHDays 9 conference. I talked about new methods of Vulnerability Prioritization in the products of Vulnerability Management vendors.

PHDays9 new ways of prioritizing vulnerabilities

During my 15 minutes time slot I defined the problems that this new technology has to solve, showed why these problems could NOT be solved using existing frameworks (CVSS), described what we currently have on the market and, as usual, criticized VM vendors and theirs solutions a little bit. ?

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Code IB 2019: Vulnerability Management Masterclass

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On March 29, I held one hour master class “HOW to avoid excessive formalism in Vulnerability Management process” at Code IB Profi 2019. Everything went quite well and I’ve got 88% positive ratings. Not bad result ^_^.

The main feature of the conference was a very special audience. The only way to visit this event was to buy a real ticket (there were no promotional codes, invites, free tickets from sponsors, etc.). So, the people who came were really interested in the content. Target audience: CISO, their deputies, leading experts from all industries. The whole event was up to 200 people, it lasted for 2 days with 4 threads of masterclasses.

This year organizers decided that titles of all masterclasses should start with “How to” (to keep them practical) and there should be checklists for each masterclass as a handout. I am going to translate my checklist Into English and publish it in this blog soon.

In fact, there were 2 masterclasses on Vulnerability Management at the conference! The second was held by Lev Paley. However, our content did not intersect: I spoke mostly about technical stuff (and I criticized VM vendors as usual), and he spoke mainly about the organizational part and high-level processes.

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