Category Archives: Topics

PRYTEK meetup: Breach and Attack Simulation or Automated Pentest?

PRYTEK meetup: Breach and Attack Simulation or Automated Pentest? Last Tuesday, November 27, I spoke at “Business Asks for Cyber Attacks” meetup organized by PRYTEK investment platform. The event was held at the PRYTEK Moscow office in a beautiful XIX century building of a former textile manufactory.

PRYTEK Breach and Attack Simulation meetup

The goal of the meetup was to talk about new approaches in Vulnerability Analysis and how they can reduce the Information Security costs for organizations.

There were two presentations:

  • The first one was by Doron Sivan, Cronus CEO. He talked about his company’s product.
  • The second was mine. I criticized traditional vendors of vulnerability scanners, talked about things that work in companies, and things that don’t work, and what you should pay attention to when choosing a Vulnerability Management tool.

For the most part this was my report from the last ISACA VM Meetup. The only difference was in the conclusions, since the topic of this event and the audience were different.

I stressed that the Attack Simulation tools, like Cronus, that analyze vulnerabilities and network connectivity of hosts can be very helpful. They allow you to assess the criticality of each vulnerability better and help to justify the need in prompt patching for IT Team (see “Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation“).

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Making Vulnerable Web-Applications: XXS, RCE, SQL Injection and Stored XSS ( + Buffer Overflow)

Making Vulnerable Web-Applications: XXS, RCE, SQL Injection and Stored XSS ( + Buffer Overflow). In this post I will write some simple vulnerable web applications in python3 and will show how to attack them. This is all for educational purposes and for complete beginners. So please don’t be too hard on me. 😉

Vulnerability Examples

As a first step I will create a basic web-application using twisted python web server (you can learn more about it in “Making simple Nmap SPA web GUI with Apache, AngularJS and Python Twisted“).

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Accelerating Splunk Dashboards with Base Searches and Saved Searches

Accelerating Splunk Dashboards with Base Searches and Saved Searches. Let’s say we have a Splunk dashboard with multiple panels. Each panel has its own search request and all of these requests work independently and simultaneously. If they are complex enough, rendering the dashboard may take quite a long time and some panels may even fall by timeout.

Accelerating Splunk Dashboards

How to avoid this? The first step is to understand how the searches are related. May be it is possible to select some base searches, and reuse their results in other child-searches. It’s also possible to get cached results from the “Saved Searches” (another name of Reports in Splunk GUI).

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How to create and manage Splunk dashboards via API

How to create and manage Splunk dashboards via API. In the previous post “How to correlate different events in Splunk and make dashboards” I mentioned that Splunk dashboards can be presented in a simple XML form. You can generate it with some script and then copy-past it in Splunk GUI.

Splunk dashboard manage api

However, this manual operations can make the process of debugging dashboards really annoying. It would be much easier to send dashboard XML content to Splunk using Splunk API. And it is actually possible. 🙂

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Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation

Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation. In my opinion, Remediation is the most difficult part of Vulnerability Management process. If you know the assets in your organization and can assess them, you will sooner or later produce a good enough flow of critical vulnerabilities. But what the point, if the IT team will not fix them?

Kübler-Ross model and Tsunami of Vulnerability Tasks

Kübler-Ross model and Tsunami of Vulnerability Remediation Tasks

Just think about it. The only thing that your colleagues from  IT team see is an unexpected  tsunami of the patching tasks. They most likely don’t understand WHY they should do it. They most likely don’t know about the concepts of Attack Surface minimization and Attack Cost maximization. From their point of view it’s just some stupid requirements from InfoSec team imposed with only one goal – to make their life miserable.

So, they may think that denial and pushing back can solve all their problems. And, frankly, this may work. There are countless ways to sabotage Vulnerability Remediation. Most main and common are the following:

  • I don’t understand how to patch this.
  • I already patched this, there should be a false positive in the scanner.
  • Why should we patch this? The vulnerability is not exploitable. Or it is exploitable in theory, but not exploitable in our particular infrastructure. Or this server is not critical and, even if it will be compromised, there won’t be a huge impact. So, we will not patch it.

In each individual case Vulnerability Analyst can describe and proof his point, but doing this for each vulnerability will require insane amount of time and efforts and will paralyze the work. It is basically the Italian strike or work-to-rule.

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Retrieving IT Asset lists from NetBox via API

Retrieving IT Asset lists from NetBox via API. A little bit more about IT Asset Inventory of Internal Network, that your IT team can provide. 😉

I have recently worked with NetBox – an open source IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution developed by well-known cloud hosting provider DigitalOcean.

NetBox api

It’s not really about security, not even a CMDB. But, security team still might be interested in NetBox, because it makes possible to track the hosts in some critical subnet without active scanning, providing great visibility of assets. Here I will show a small example of NetBox API usage.

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Assessing Linux Security Configurations with SCAP Workbench

Assessing Linux Security Configurations with SCAP Workbench. Recently I had a chance to work with OpenSCAP. It’s a set of free and open-source tools for Linux Configuration Assessment and  a collection security content in SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) format.

In this post I will write about SCAP Workbench. It is a GUI application that can check the configuration of your local Linux host (or the remote host via ssh; note that agent installation is required), and show the settings that are not comply with some security standard, for example PCI DSS or DISA STIG.

SCAP Workbench PCI DSS CentOS7 localhost

Moreover, you can generate the script for automated remediation. You can also create your own scan profiles based on existing  SCAP content.

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