Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: Why You May Need It and How to Export Hosts via API in Python. Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. It’s not a well-known free Defender antivirus built in Windows 10, but an enterprise level solution with the similar name. Yes, the naming is pretty confusing.
I will not repeat Microsoft’s marketing thesis. Just the basic idea. The Windows endpoints on your network have built-in agents that can send some data to the Microsoft cloud. In the cloud, they process this data into security events. Users can see these events in the web interface on the Microsoft website.
Vulners Linux Audit API for Host Vulnerability Detection: Manual Auditing, Python Scripting and Licensing. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Vulners Linux Audit API, which allows you to detect vulnerabilities on a Linux host knowing only the OS version and installed packages. I had a similar post about this 4 years ago, but some details have changed, so I came back to this topic.
Vulristics Vulnerability Score, Automated Data Collection and Microsoft Patch Tuesdays Q4 2020. In this episode I would like to make a status update of my Vulristics project. For those who don’t know, in this project I retrieve publicly available vulnerability data and analyze it to better understand the severity of these vulnerabilities and better prioritize them. Currently, it is mainly about Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities, but I have plans to go further. Also in this episode I want to demonstrate the new Vulristics features on Microsoft Patch Tuesday reports for October, November and December 2020.
Patch Tuesdays Automated Data Collection
First of all, I dealt with the annoying collecting of the data for Microsoft Patch Tuesdays reports. Previously it took pretty long time. I had to go to Microsoft website and search for CVE IDs. After that, I had to get the comments from various Vulnerability Management vendors and researchers blogs (Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7, ZDI). I wanted this to be as much automated as possible. I have added some code to make CVE search requests on the Microsoft website for a date range (including the second Tuesday of the month). I also figured out how to make searches on the Vulnerability Management vendors blogs. So, now to get a Microsoft Patch Tuesday report it’s only necessary to set the year and month.
MaxPatrol VM: An Ambitious Vision for Vulnerability Management Transformation. In this episode, I would like to share my thoughts about the new Vulnerability Management product by Positive Technologies – MaxPatrol VM. It was presented on November 16th, at the Standoff365 online conference (full video in Russian). The presentation and concept of the product were very good. I really liked them. However, as it always happens on vendor’s events, some critical topics were not covered. So I also want to highlight them. I will try to be as objective as possible. Although it is difficult for me, since I have worked in the company for 6 years, and many of my good friends work there.
Positive Technologies is best known in the Russian Vulnerability Management market. The volume of the Russian VM market in 2019 is $40-46 million. The volume of the world market, according to IDC, is $1.2 billion. So the Russian market is ~3% of the world market. And 78% of it is occupied by Positive Technologies products: Maxpatrol 8 and XSpider. Disclaimer: all numbers are from the Maxpatrol VM presentation and I haven’t done fact checking. But in this case, the numbers are not so important.
Nessus Essentials with offline registration and plugin updates. In this episode, I would like to talk about Nessus Essentials and, in particular, how to register and update it without direct internet access. Nothing complicated, but there are a couple of pitfalls that I would like to share.
Let’s say you need to scan a host in a critical autonomous segment where Internet access is strictly prohibited. In such scenarios, Nessus Essentials is really suitable. It is a fully functional network vulnerability scanner with a good vulnerability knowledgebase. It can be registered and updated offline! And most importantly, it’s free even for corporate use! There is, of course, a 16 IP addresses limit, but in this case it is not really important.
Microsoft Patch Tuesday September 2020: Zerologon and other exploits, RCEs in SharePoint and Exchange. I would like to start this post by talking about Microsoft vulnerabilities, which recently turned out to be much more serious than it seemed at first glance.
Older Vulnerabilities with exploits
“Zerologon” Netlogon RCE (CVE-2020-1472)
One of them is, of course, the Netlogon vulnerability from the August 2020 Patch Tuesday. It’s called “Zerologon”. I would not say that Vulnerability Management vendors completely ignored it. But none of them (well, maybe only ZDI) emphasized in their reports that this vulnerability would be a real disaster.
Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2020: vulnerabilities with Detected Exploitation, useful for phishing and others. This time I would like to review not only the vulnerabilities that were published in the last August Microsoft Patch Tuesday, but also the CVEs that were published on other, not Patch Tuesday, days. Of course, if there are any.
But let’s start with the vulnerabilities that were presented on MS Patch Tuesday on August 11th. There were 120 vulnerabilities: 17 of them are Critical and 103 Important. My vulristics script could not find public exploits for these vulnerabilities on Vulners.com.
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