Category Archives: Compliance Management

Tenable University: Nessus Certificate of Proficiency

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Yesterday I finished “Nessus Certificate of Proficiency” learning plan at Tenable University and passed the final test. Here I would like to share my impressions.

Nessus Certificate test completed

First of all, few words about my motivation. I use Nessus literally every day at work. So, it was fun to check my knowledge. I already wrote about Tenable education portal in “Study Vulnerability Assessment in Tenable University for free” post. It’s free. It’s available for everyone on demand. However, Tenable customers get access to way more content.

At this moment there are four learning plan available for Tenable customers: for Nessus, Tenable.io, SecurityCenter and SecurityCenter Continuous View. Each learning plan consist of short video lessons grouped in courses and the final test.

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New Nessus 7 Professional and the end of cost-effective Vulnerability Management (as we knew it)

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It’s an epic and really sad news. 🙁

Nessus 7 release

When people asked me about the cost-effective solution for Vulnerability Management I usually answered: “Nessus Professional with some additional automation through Nessus API”.

With just a couple of Nessus Professional scanning nodes it was possible to scan all the infrastructure and network perimeter (see “Vulnerability Management for Network Perimeter“). Price for each node was fixed and reasonable. And you could make your any reports from the raw scan data, as you like it.

Nessus Pro was still were best choice even when Tenable:

  • Cut off master/slave functionality in Nessus and created “Nessus Manager”.
  • Changed API completely during the update from 5 to 6 version.
  • Gradually increased the price from $1,5k to $2,7k per scanning node per year.

But unfortunately it’s not anymore. End of an era.

And what is even more sad is that Tenable does not mention disabling the API and multi-user function in the main Nessus 7 marketing, as it never was, as if it’s not very important. Just look at “Announcing Nessus Professional v7” – not a word  about “API” or users. Only in additional link:

get more information Nessus7

Only there, in the text (not a video) there is an information about removed features.

The nice little things like “Easily transferable license” and “Emailed scan reports and custom report name / logo” do not make it any better.

So, what next?

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Vulnerability Management vendors and massive Malware attacks (following the Bad Rabbit)

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After the latest Bad Rabbit ransomware attack all Top VM vendors Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7 wrote blog posts on this topic on the same day. Two days later Tripwire also published own  review. Why do they care? They do not make antiviruses, endpoint protection or firewalls – the common tools against this kind of threats. So, what’s the point?

VM vendors BadRabbit

Well, they do it is obviously to promote their products and services. But how exactly?

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Scaner-VS: Vulnerability Management solution for Russian Military

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Scaner-VS is a Vulnerability Assessment system developed by Moscow-based NPO Echelon. It’s pretty popular in Russian government organizations, especially in Russian Army, because it comply all government requirements, has all necessary certificates and is relatively cheap.

Scaner-VS webgui

As for requirements and certificates, NPO Echelon itself is an important certification authority, so they know how to do the things right. It’s not a secret product or something. You can request trial version freely at http://scaner-vs.ru/version-for-testing/. But note, that it is only available in Russian. I am also sorry, but screenshots in this post will be also in Russian. I will try to do my best to describe them properly.

When you fill the form on Echelon website, you will soon get a link to 3.3 gb .iso file by email. Run it in VirtualBox virtual machine (choose Debian 64 or Debian 32).

Here is a boot menu. Choose first default option.

Scaner-VS boot

Some seconds later you will see Linux desktop environment with Scaner-VS web-GUI opened in Firefox.

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Installing OpenVAS 9 from the sources

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upd. 29.09.2018 Unfortunately, the script does not work after Greenbone moved the sources from their internal repository to GitHub. It’s necessary to edit the script. Stay tuned.

In last month Greenbone Networks and OpenVAS development team have finally presented new OpenVAS 9 with new GUI, improved multi-scanner support, improved asset management, etc. We have been waiting for this release for 2 years!

Upd. Please note, that entire procedure for separating scanners onto separate hardware/distributed hardware in different datacenters has changed completely – and that it’s a good idea to get familiar with this new procedure prior to upgrading to OpenVAS 9. 😉

For installing OpenVAS 9 from the sources I used the same script as for OpenVAS 8 installation last year. More details about this script and why you may need it you can read in the post “openvas_commander for OpenVAS installation and management“.

OpenVAS 9 Dashboards

I fixed the script a bit because of these changes in OpenVAS9:

  • openvas-nvt-syncwas renamed to greenbone-nvt-sync
  • openvas-mkcert and openvas-mkcert-client were replaced by openvas-manage-certs

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Rapid7 Nexpose in 2017

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Last year I tested Rapid7 Nexpose and wrote two posts about installation and use of Nexpose Community Edition and Nexpose API. I didn’t follow news of this vendor for a about year. Today I watched live demo of Nexpose latest version. It has some new interesting features, improvements and ideas, that I would like to mention.

Rapid7 Nexpose in 2017

And of course, things that sales people say to you should be always taken with some skepticism. Only concrete implementation tested in your environment matters. But they usually mention some useful ideas that can be perceived independently from the products they promote.
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MaxPatrol 8 installation process

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Today I have a great opportunity to write about MaxPatrol 8. For me it is a very nostalgic experience. I worked for many year in Positive Technologies developing this product. And now I can write about it from the customer side.

MaxPatrol is still not very well known outside Russia and CIS, although this product available in English, and has even a Korean localization. So, why not to introduce this product to the readers of my blog? The other reason to write this post is a pretty common opinion, that MaxPatrol is very hard to install and use, and it is the main disadvantage of the product. In fact it is not true.

MaxPatrol 8 loading screen

MaxPatrol is not perfect like any other product. But it’s no more complex than any other enterprise level Vulnerability Management product. It’s my considered opinion after working with a number of other vulnerability and compliance assessment products. GUI may look unfamiliar from the first look, but you can quickly get used to it.

As for the functional capabilities, in some cases it is even difficult to compete with MaxPatrol. Here are the most interesting features:

  1. Advanced White Box assessment:
    • Extended OS inventory
    • Software license control
    • User control
    • Password recovery (hash brute-force)
    • Security checks for running services
  2. Advanced Compliance scanning capabilities
  3. Special assessment modules:
    • SAP ERP
    • SCADA
    • Core telecom networks
  4. Forensic mode – security incidents detection based on event logs analysis

The first blog post will be about MaxPatrol installation.

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