Category Archives: Productology

October 2023: back to Positive Technologies, Vulristics updates, Linux Patch Wednesday, Microsoft Patch Tuesday, PhysTech VM lecture

Hello everyone! October was an interesting and busy month for me. I started a new job, worked on my open source Vulristics project, and analyzed vulnerabilities using it. Especially Linux vulnerabilities as part of my new Linux Patch Wednesday project. And, of course, analyzed Microsoft Patch Tuesday as well. In addition, at the end of October I was a guest lecturer at MIPT/PhysTech university. But first thing first.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239138

Back to Positive Technologies

On October 3, I joined the Positive Technologies team. There I will work on developing Vulnerability Management practices. I have already worked at PT for 6 years, from June 2009 to October 2015. And now, exactly 8 years later, I’m here again. I feel very pleasant emotions about this and have many plans. 🤩 I am sure that in the PT team I will be able to implement many cool things for the development of Vulnerability Management in Russia and abroad. 🙂

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September 2023: VM courses, Bahasa Indonesia, Russian Podcasts, Goodbye Tinkoff, MS Patch Tuesday, Qualys TOP 20, Linux, Forrester, GigaOm, R-Vision VM

Hello everyone! On the last day of September, I decided to record another retrospective episode on how my Vulnerability Management month went.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239136

September was quite a busy month for me.

Vulnerability Management courses

I participated in two educational activities. The first one is an on-line cyber security course for my alma mater, Bauman Moscow State Technical University.

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August 2023: GitHub PoCs, Vulristics, Qualys First-Party, Tenable ExposureAI, SC Awards and Rapid7, Anglo-Saxon list, MS Patch Tuesday, WinRAR, Juniper

Hello everyone! This month I decided NOT to make an episode completely dedicated to Microsoft Patch Tuesday. Instead, this episode will be an answer to the question of how my Vulnerability Management month went. A retrospection of some kind.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239134

GitHub exploits and Vulristics

This month I made some improvements to my Vulristics vulnerability prioritization tool. These changes relate to the use of exploit data on Github. We all know that exploits are often posted on GitHub. But how adequate is this source in order to evaluate the exploitability?

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday July 2023: Vulristics improvements, Office RCE, SFB SmartScreen and Outlook, EoP MSHTML and ERS, other RCEs

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for July 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between June and July Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239131

As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities.

Vulristics improvements

I optimized the detection of the vulnerable product and the type of vulnerability based on the description. Now processing already downloaded data (with option --rewrite-flag "False") takes a few seconds. For example, only ~3 seconds for 100 MS Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities . It used to take a few minutes.

What I’ve done:

  1. For Microsoft generated descriptions, e.g. “Microsoft Excel Remote Code Execution Vulnerability”, vulnerability type and product are now directly parsed out of the description, keyword search is not performed.
  2. I rewrote the generic keyword search based on products.json. I have reduced the use of heavy functions without sacrificing the quality of the detections.
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Microsoft Patch Tuesday June 2023: Edge type confusion, Git RCE, OneNote Spoofing, PGM RCE, Exchange RCE, SharePoint EoP

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for June 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between May and June Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239127

As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I took the comments about the vulnerabilities from the Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7, ZDI Patch Tuesday reviews. This time there were only 3 vulnerabilities used in attacks or with a public exploit. And only one of them is more or less relevant.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday May 2023: Microsoft Edge, BlackLotus Secure Boot SFB, OLE RCE, Win32k EoP, NFS RCE, PGM RCE, LDAP RCE, SharePoint RCE

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for May 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between April and May Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239126

As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I took the comments about the vulnerabilities from the Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7, ZDI Patch Tuesday reviews.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had such tiny Patch Tuesday. 57 CVEs, including CVEs appeared during the month. And only 38 without them! 😄

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2023: CLFS EoP, Word RCE, MSMQ QueueJumper RCE, PCL6, DNS, DHCP

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between March and April Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239123

As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I took the comments about the vulnerabilities from the Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7, ZDI Patch Tuesday reviews. And this is the first Patch Tuesday report since I added EPSS support to Vulristics. 😉

Compared to March, Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2023 is kind of weak. 🙄

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