Category Archives: Productology

ZeroNights 2017: back to the cyber 80s

ZeroNights 2017: back to the cyber 80s. Last Friday, 17th of November, I attended the ZeroNights 2017 conference in Moscow. And it was pretty awesome. Thanks to the organizers! Here I would like to share some of my impressions.

my photo ZeroNights 2017

First of all, I want to say that two main Moscow events for information security practitioners, PHDays and ZeroNights, provide an excellent opportunity to meet all of the colleagues at once and to synchronize current views on important information security issues, including, of course, Vulnerability Management, the most relevant for me. My opinion is that this year’s behind-the-scene conversations were especially good. And this is the most valuable characteristic for the event.

Every ZeroNights event has it’s own style. This time it was some geeky cyber retro from 1980s, like in popular cult movie Kung Fury. The place was also changed from familiar Cosmos Hotel  to ZIL Culture Centre. It is the largest Palace of Culture from the Soviet Moscow times. The combination of US 80s cultural artifacts, RETROWAVE music with Soviet-style interiors (including, for example, statue of Lenin) made a pretty weird combination, but I liked it =)

I was unintentionally taking photos using some strange mode in camera and recorded a very short video fragment (3-5 seconds) for each photo. I decided to combine this fragments in a small video. This does not make much sense, but, perhaps, someone will find this “time-lapse” interesting 😉

Among the great presentations and workshops, there were also a small exhibition. This year there was two Vulnerability Management vendors: Beyond Security and Qualys.

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

Vulnerability Management vendors and massive Malware attacks (following the Bad Rabbit). 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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Study Vulnerability Assessment in Tenable University for free

Study Vulnerability Assessment in Tenable University for free. Not so long ago, Tenable presented renewed online training platform – Tenable University. It is publicly available even for non-customers, for example, for Nessus Home users. However, not all courses are available in this case.

Login screen

I decided to check it out, registering as non-customer.

Sign up

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Exploitability attributes of Nessus plugins: good, bad and Vulners

Exploitability attributes of Nessus plugins: good, bad and Vulners. Exploitability is one of the most important criteria for prioritizing vulnerabilities. Let’s see how good is the exploit-related data of Tenable Nessus NASL plugins and whether we can do it better.

Nessus exploitability

What are the attributes related to exploits? To understand this, I parsed all nasl plugins and got the following results.

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ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2017

ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2017. Last Thursday, I attended a very interesting event entirely dedicated to Vulnerability Management – open ISACA Moscow meetup. Me and my former colleague from Mail.Ru Group Dmitry Chernobaj presented there our joint report “Enterprise Vulnerability Management: fancy marketing brochures and the real-life troubles”.

The number of registered participants totaled 120. As I can tell looking at the photo below, there were about 80 people in the hall after the second presentation. For a highly focused local information security event, it’s a lot. According to the organizers, it was the largest ISACA Moscow meetup. Thanks to everyone who came!

ISACA VM Meetup Auditorium

I would like to mention a well-structured agenda. There were 4 presentations arranged in order: from the most theoretical / methodical to the most practical. And our presentation was the last one.

Oleg Boyko started the event. He was talking about the place of Vulnerability Management in COBIT 5 framework. I don’t know COBIT good enough to comment on this. The main thing I’ve noticed is that among the 37 COBIT 5 processes, there is no a process for managing the vulnerabilities, such as Manage Assets or Manage Configurations.

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CWEs in NVD CVE feed: analysis and complaints

CWEs in NVD CVE feed: analysis and complaints. As you probably know, one of the ways to describe the nature of some software vulnerability is to provide corresponding CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) ids. Let’s see the CWE links in NVD CVE base.

NVD CWEs

I have already wrote earlier how to deal with NVD feed using python in “Downloading and analyzing NVD CVE feed“. You can easily get CWEs ids iterating over cve_dict['CVE_Items'].

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Vulners NASL Plugin Feeds for OpenVAS 9

Vulners NASL Plugin Feeds for OpenVAS 9. As I already wrote earlier, you can easily add third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS. So, my friends from Vulners.com realised generation of NASL plugins for OpenVAS using own security content. I’ve tested it for scanning CentOS 7 host. And it works =)

Vulners OpenVAS vulnerabilities

Let’s see the whole process.

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