Export anything to Splunk with HTTP Event Collector. In a previous post I described how to export Nessus scan reports to Splunk server using standard app. Today let’s see how to export any structured data presented in JSON, including of course Nessus scan reports, to Splunk using HTTP Event Collector.
First of all, we should create new HTTP Event Collector
http://your_splunk_host:8000/en-US/manager/launcher/http-eventcollector
And press “New Token” button
Exporting Nessus scan results to Splunk. In this first post I want to write about Splunk and Nessus integration via official “Splunk Add-on for Tenable”: how to install this application, its pros and cons.
You can download Splunk application package for Tenable Nessus and SecurityCenter from official website here (free registration is required). All documentation is available here.
Tenable SecurityCenter and its API. SecurityCenter is an enterprise level vulnerability management product of Tenable Network Security. As the name implies, the it is designed to be the center of Tenable security infrastructure. SecurityCenter takes data from other Tenable products: Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS), Log Correlation Engine (LCE), Nessus, and provides a powerful GUI interface for searching and reporting. Sounds familiar? Well, yes, it is something like SIEM, but with a strong emphasis on Vulnerability Management.
I’ve took this screenshot from SC5 video presentation in Spanish.
In this post, I certainly will not fully cover SC functionality and all the features of its API. I just would like to pay tribute to a convenient asset mechanism of SecurityCenter and show very basic operation of SecurityCenter API: retrieving the results of the vulnerability scanning (as I did it for Nessus in “Retrieving scan results through Nessus API“).
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Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side. Original article was published in Information Security Magazine #2, 2016 (in Russian)
Vulnerability scanner is a computer program or hardware appliance designed to detect security problems on hosts in computer network. What kind of problems? Well, problems that may occur if some critical security updates were not installed on time or the system was not configured securely. In practice, this situation often occurs and it makes hacking the systems easy even for inexperienced attacker.
If it is all about checking, maybe it’s possible to do it manually? Yes, sure, but it requires a lot of specific expertise, accuracy and time. That’s why vulnerability scanners, which can automate network audit, have become standard tools in the arsenal of information security experts.
I worked for a long time in the development department of well-known vulnerability scanning vendor and was making a lot of competitive analysis as well. At current time, I use vulnerability scanners as an end user. So, in this article I will try to look at the main problems of this class of products from the vendor and from the end user side.
Detection methods are usually well known and uncomplicated: vulnerability scanner somehow detects software version installed on a host. If version is less then secure version of this software (known from the public bulletin) – vulnerability exists and the software should be updated. If not – everything is ok. As a rule, vulnerability scanners try to guess installed versions by opened ports and service banners, or scanner may just have a full remote access to the host and able to perform all necessary commands (it is the most accurate and effective way).
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openvas_commander for OpenVAS installation and management. 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.
If you will search articles about OpenVAS most of them will be about installation: installation in Kali (in 3 lines) and various bash scripts for installing it from the sources.
Pros of using installation the sources:
Cons:
I wrote a small bash script to simplify OpenVAS installation and management of – openvas_commander.sh. Tested on Debian 8.5, should work on Ubuntu and Kali.
Upd 10.04.2017 Read how to use this script to install OpenVAS 9 on Debian in the post “Installing OpenVAS 9 from the sources“.
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leonov-av/openvas-commander/master/openvas_commander.sh
chmod +x openvas_commander.sh
What are its advantages over other similar scripts?
Choosing the right time for Nessus update. Nessus update may be required for bugs and vulnerabilities fixing, and to enable some new features as well. While using of an old scanning engine or plugin feed may lead to incorrect scan results.
However, during the update process of Nessus engine, you need to stop it. What about the running and scheduled scanning tasks?
Someone might think that it is possible to put running Nessus scan task on pause and launch it when update process is finished. Well, not really. All paused scan tasks will be marked as “aborted” after updating.
Even if Tenable will ever fix this, delayed scans may still be incorrect. Different targets should be scanned at the right time. It’s not a good idea to scan windows desktops after the end of the working day, when they will be probably turned off.
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Retrieving scan results through Nessus API. In this first article about Nessus API I want to describe process of getting scan results from Nessus.
Of course, it’s also great to create and run scans or even create policies via API. But to be honest, in practice, you may need this functionality rarely. And it’s easier to do it manually in GUI. On the other hand, sometimes it very efficient to create automatically some specific scan task for specific group of hosts using existing (inventory) scan results. But we will talk about this topic next time (Upd. I wrote post about scan creation “Nessus API for hosts scanning“).
Now, imagine that we have configured regular Nessus scans. And we want to get this scan results on a regular basis to make some analysis and maybe create some tickets in Jira.
As usual, I will use curl for all examples, because it is easy to read and easy to test in any Linux terminal.
Starting from Nessus v.6 the API manual is built in GUI: https://<scanner_ip>:8834/api#
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