Category Archives: Productology

Tenable Nessus: registration, installation, scanning and reporting

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Tenable Nessus: registration, installation, scanning and reporting. It’s a bit strange that I wrote in this blog about some relatively exotic vulnerability management solutions and not about the one I use every day. It is, of course, Nessus. The legend of vulnerability scanners. It would be fair to say that Nessus has become a synonym for vulnerability scan itself as Xerox for photocopy. First version of Nessus was developed by Renaud Deraison in 1998 as a free and open-source product. In October 2005 the license was changed to proprietary. The last version of GPL source codes became the base for the great open source vulnerability scanner – OpenVAS (btw, see my post “openvas_commander for OpenVAS installation and management”).

Nessus Vulnerability Scan Results

I am glad that Tenable still keeps Nessus mostly in UNIX-way. Nessus is a vulnerability scanner and makes one thing good – finds vulnerabilities on network hosts. If you need dashboards, advanced user management, advanced reporting capabilities, etc. use Tenable Security Center that works above the Tenable separate products: Nessus, Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS) and Log Correlation Engine (LCE).

nessus download page

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Vulnerability Management in APAC

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Vulnerability Management in APAC. Tenable Network Security published Forrester report on Vulnerability Management in APAC (China: 25%, Singapore: 25%, Japan: 25%, ANZ: 25%). Everything is pretty bad. The majority of the respondents scan their systems periodically (annually). Key challenges: the difficulty of remediation and prioritization. It seems that 30% respondents don’t even have automatically updatable Security Content in their VM solution.
Forrester Vulnerability Management in APAC

Who will take the market share of McAfee Vulnerability Manager?

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Who will take the market share of McAfee Vulnerability Manager? McAfee® Vulnerability Manager (MVM) End of Life

We are observing an interesting case now. Short time ago, Intel Security have finally killed their McAfee® Vulnerability Manager (MVM) / FoundStone product and mutually with Rapid7 presented “Nexpose‬ Migration Toolkit”.

MVM to Nexpose migration

The Migration Toolkit contains Deployment and Migration related documentation that outlines the migration path, as well as a proprietary utility to easily migrate several key components of the customers MVM deployment into Nexpose.

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High-Tech Bridge service and API for SSL/TLS server testing

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High-Tech Bridge service and API for SSL/TLS server testing. Another great free SSL security testing service — High-Tech Bridge SSL Server Test (and Free API). I have already reviewed something quite familiar – Qualys SSL Labs client. So naturally there will be an element of comparison.

High-Tech Bridge SSL/TLS test request

Why have I tried something else after Qualys SSL Labs? The thing is Qualys doesn’t support IP addresses as a target. Maybe they don’t want it to be used for assessing full IP-ranges. I don’t know. But the fact is “IP addresses are not allowed”.

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Vulners.com search API

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Vulners.com search API. Upd. Vulners released updated Vulners API. What is written below is still working. But now it’s all this can be done much easier.

The greatest thing is “references=true”. It makes possible to get all the referenced objects (exploits, detection plugins, etc.) and bulletin description in ONE search request.

So, for example bellow this query will be enough: https://vulners.com/api/v3/search/lucene/?query=cvss.score:10%20type:centos%20order:published&references=true

Life is getting better! 😉

In a previous post I made a brief review of Vulners.com security content database and search engine. Today let’s see how to automate searching of vulnerabilities, exploits, patches, bugbounty results, etc, with vulners.com search API.

Vulners Search API

It is really easy. We just need to send POST-request to https://vulners.com/api/v1/luceneSearch/ with JSON structure containing search query, size of results you want to get (10000 is maximum), and number of search result entities you would like to skip (optional). Huge size parameter limit makes possible, for example, getting all 2267 CentOS security bulletins with only one request. At the moment, no authorization is required to make requests and no limits for API use exist. Of course, the service is in active development phase and this functionality may be changed soon.

So, let’s get latest CentOS bulletin with most critical vulnerability:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"query":"cvss.score:10 type:centos order:published", "size":1}' https://vulners.com/api/v1/luceneSearch/ | python -m json.tool
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Improved interface of new Nessus Cloud v. 6.6

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Improved interface of new Nessus Cloud v. 6.6. Tenable just released new version of Nessus. Most changes was made in cloud-based version of their popular scanner – Nessus Cloud. Official screenshots are not available yet, so I made couple of them from the tutorial video. If you’re a current Tenable customer, you can log in to the Tenable Support Portal, click the Training Videos link and watch “Workflow changes in Nessus Cloud 6.6” by yourself.

The most interesting change, in my opinion – the new dashboards. Where you’d normally seen a list of scan jobs, you’ll see a new dashboard, that will give you a quick overview of scan results:

  • Changes in number of critical, high, medium and low vulnerabilities detected in the system
  • Part of the vulnerabilities that are exploitable, older than 30 days, detected with authenticated scan and has a remediation recommendations
  • Top vulnerability detection plugins

Nessus Cloud Dashboards

Scan results moved to the separate “Scans” tab. And on the same tab we see the “Resources”: Policies, Asset Lists, Exclusions, Scanners and Agents.

Nessus Cloud Scans

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Qualys SSL Labs console client

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Qualys SSL Labs console client. Qualys SSL Labs is a free online service, which performs a deep analysis of web server SSL configuration and detects some common OpenSSL vulnerabilities either (e.g. Heartbleed).

Qualys SSL Lab Report

This service has an API and official console client, that could be used to automate security assessment.

Qualys SSL Labs official console client ssllabs-scan

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