Category Archives: Vulnerability Management

CISO Forum 2022: the first major Russian security conference in the New Reality

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Hello everyone! After a two-year break, I took part in Moscow CISO Forum 2022 with a small talk “Malicious open source: the cost of using someone else’s code”.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239084

CISO Forum is the first major Russian conference since the beginning of The New Reality of Information Security (TNRoIS). My presentation was just on this topic. How malicious commits in open source projects change development and operations processes. I will make a separate video about this (upd. added Malicious Open Source: the cost of using someone else’s code). In this episode, I would like to tell you a little about the conference itself.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2022

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Hello everyone! I am glad to greet you from the most sanctioned country in the world. Despite all the difficulties, we carry on. I even have some time to release new episodes. This time it will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2022.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239076

I do the analysis as usual with my open source tool Vulristics. You can still download it on github. I hope that github won’t block Russian repositories and accounts, but for now it looks possible. Most likely, I will just start hosting the sources of my projects on avleonov.com in this case. Or on another domain, if it gets even tougher. Stay tuned.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2022

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2022. I release it pretty late, because of the my previous big episode about the blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners. Please take a look if you haven’t seen it. Well, if you are even slightly interested in the world news, you can imagine that the end of February 2022 in Eastern Europe is not the best time to create new content on Vulnerability Management. Let’s hope that peace and tranquility will be restored soon. And also that geopolitical confrontation between the largest nuclear powers will de-escalate somehow.

But let’s get back to information security. While working on Microsoft Patch Tuesday report for February 2022, I made a lot of improvements to my open source project for vulnerability prioritization Vulristics. I want to start with them.

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VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners

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Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf22 Vulnerability Management conference. I want to talk about the blind spots in the knowledge bases of Vulnerability Scanners and Vulnerability Management products.

This report was presented in Russian at Tenable Security Day 2022. The video is here.

Potential customers rarely worry about the completeness of the Knowledge Base when choosing a Vulnerability Scanner. They usually trust the VM vendors’ claims of the “largest vulnerability base” and the total number of detection plugins. But in fact the completeness is very important. All high-level vulnerability prioritization features are meaningless unless the vulnerability has been reliably detected. In this presentation, I will show the examples of blindspots in the knowledge bases of vulnerability management products, try to describe the causes and what we (as customers and the community) can do about it.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday January 2022

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for January 2022. Traditionally, I will use my open source Vulristics tool for analysis. This time I didn’t make any changes to how connectors work. The report generation worked correctly on the first try.

python3.8 vulristics.py --report-type "ms_patch_tuesday" --mspt-year 2022 --mspt-month "January" --rewrite-flag "True"

The only thing I have improved is the detection of types of vulnerabilities and vulnerable products. “Unknown Vulnerability Type” was for two vulnerabilities, so I added the “Elevation Of Privilege” и “Cross-Site Scripting” spelling options. I added detections for 13 products and 19 Windows components. I also corrected the method for sorting vulnerabilities with the same Vulristics score. Previously, such vulnerabilities were sorted by CVE id, now they are sorted by vulnerability type and product. This allows you to see the clusters of similar vulnerabilities.

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VMconf 22: Why Didn’t It Work As Planned and What’s Next?

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Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about VMconf 22. It was an experiment from the beginning. Is it possible to host a Vulnerability Management event with little effort and budget? Looks like no. So I would like to talk about why the original idea failed and the future of VMconf.

The initial idea was to create a website, announce the launch of the CFP in social networks and everything else will happen automatically. People will apply and all that remains is to choose the best talks and manage the stream of the event. Well, no, not really.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday December 2021

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Hello everyone! It’s even strange to talk about other vulnerabilities, while everyone is so focused on vulnerabilities in log4j. But life doesn’t stop. Other vulnerabilities appear every day. And of course, there are many critical ones among them that require immediate patching. This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for December 2021.

I will traditionally use my open source Vulristics tool for analysis.

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