Category Archives: Topics

How to correlate different events in Splunk and make dashboards

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How to correlate different events in Splunk and make dashboards. Recently I’ve spent some time dealing with Splunk. Despite the fact that I have already done various Splunk searches before, for example in “Tracking software versions using Nessus and Splunk“, the correlation of different events in Splunk seems to be a very different task. And there not so many publicly available examples of this on the Internet. So, I decided to write a small post about it myself.

Splunk dashboard

Disclaimer: I’m not a pro in Splunk. I don’t have an idea if I am doing this the right or in optimal way. 😉 I just learned some tricks, they worked for me well and I want to share it with you. 

I will show the following case:

  1. We have some active network hosts.
  2. Some software product should be installed these hosts.
  3. We will send “host X is active” and “software is installed on host X” events to the Splunk server.
  4. We want to get some diagrams in Splunk that will show us on which hosts the software is  installed and how number of such hosts is changing in time.

As you can see, the task is quite a trivial and it can be easily implemented in pure Python. But the idea is to make it in Splunk. 😉

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Masking Vulnerability Scan reports

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Masking Vulnerability Scan reports. Continuing the series of posts about Kenna (“Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data“, “Connectors and REST API“) and similar services. Is it actually safe to send your vulnerability data to some external cloud service for analysis? Leakage of such information can potentially cause great damage to your organization, right?

Masking Vulnerability Scans

It’s once again a problem of trust to vendor. IMHO, in some cases it may make sense to hide the real hostnames and ip-addresses of the target hosts in scan reports. So, it would be clear for analysis vendor that some critical vulnerability exists somewhere, but it would not be clear where exactly.

To do this, each hostname/ip-address should be replaced to some values of similar type and should be replaced on the same value each time. So the algorithms of Kenna-like service could work with this masked reports. This mean that we need to create a replacement dictionary.

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Kenna Security: Connectors and REST API

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Kenna Security: Connectors and REST API. In the last post about Kenna Security cloud service I mentioned their main features for analyzing data from different vulnerability scanners. Now let’s see how to import Tenable Nessus scan results in Kenna. Here you can see the list of connectors for all supported products:

Kenna connectors

Three connectors for Nessus are available:

  • Nessus Importer retrieves existing scan results from your Nessus server.
  • Nessus Scanner can schedule scans on your Nessus server.
  • Nessus XML imports xml (.Nessus2) files.

First two connectors work with Nessus server directly. And they probably won’t work anymore with Nessus Professional 7, because of API removing (see “New Nessus 7 Professional and the end of cost-effective Vulnerability Management (as we knew it)“). If Nessus server is deployed on-premise you should use special Kenna Virtual Tunnel.

Last “Nessus XML” connector is the most flexible. No matter how you got your scan results, it will be possible to import them to Kenna. See how to get XML reports from from Nessus server in a post “Retrieving scan results through Nessus API“.  You can upload XML scan results using Kenna web GUI (not very efficient way, but for testing – why not?) or REST API.

To use Kenna REST API you will need an Application Token. Go to the the Settings menu -> Applications:

Kenna settings

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Making simple Nmap SPA web GUI with Apache, AngularJS and Python Twisted

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Making simple Nmap SPA web GUI with Apache, AngularJS and Python Twisted. The last time I was developing dynamic web applications years ago. I used CGI and PHP back then. 🙂 Now I am really interested in a modern approach, when you have a Single Page Web Application (SPA) written in HTML and JavaScript, that makes http requests to some external API.

It’s pretty cool, because your application becomes API-centric naturally. You work on human interface and improve integration capabilities at the same time. And the task of securing your web app mostly reduces to securing your formalized API.

nmap SPA GUI

The very best way to learn something new is to write a post about this stuff. 😉 Here I will reproduce my own steps of making a very basic web app:

  1. Launch Apache web-server with http/https.
  2. Make a simple API service: Nmap wrapper.
  3. Make a web-application with “multipage” experience. There should be at least two pages: Scan and About.
  4. On Scan page it will be possible to input a target (hostname or IP), scan arguments and  launch scan by clicking on the button. The same behavior will be if the target will be passed as a parameter in address bar.
  5. On other pages should be some static text.

As you can see, it is a very limited task, but it should clear up the most confusing parts of the process.

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Kenna Security: Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data

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Kenna Security: Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data. I’ve been following Kenna Security (before 2015 Risk I/O) for a pretty long time. Mainly, because they do the things I do on a daily basis: analyse various vulnerability scan results and feeds, and prioritize detected vulnerabilities for further mitigation. The only difference is that my scripts and reports are highly specific for my employer’s infrastructure and needs. And guys from Kenna team make a standardized scalable cloud solution that should be suitable for everyone.

I think their niche is really great. They do not compete directly with Vulnerability Management vendors. They can be partners with any of them, bringing additional features to the customers. Perfect win-win combination. That’s why Kenna speakers regularly participate in joint webinars with VM vendors.

I couldn’t lose a great opportunity to see Kenna Security service in action. 😉

In this post I will try to make a very brief review of Kenna functionality and formulate pros and cons of the solution.

When you submit trial request at https://www.eu.kennasecurity.com/signup (or https://app.kennasecurity.com/signup if you are not in Europe) you will get a link to your company account:

https://corporation.eu.kennasecurity.com/

The login screen will look like this:

Kenna login

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Confluence REST API for reading and updating wiki pages

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Confluence REST API for reading and updating wiki pages. In previous posts I wrote how to automate the work with Atlassian Jira, including automated ticket labeling. Now let’s try to use REST API of another popular Atlassian product – Confluence wiki engine.

Confluence REST API

What you may want to automate in Confluence? Obviously, it may be useful to read the pages that your colleagues regularly update and then use this data in some scripts as an input. You may also want to update your own Confluence pages, for example to post Vulnerability Scanning results. 😉

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New Nessus 7 Professional and the end of cost-effective Vulnerability Management (as we knew it)

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New Nessus 7 Professional and the end of cost-effective Vulnerability Management (as we knew it). It’s an epic and really sad news. 🙁

Nessus 7 release

When people asked me about the cost-effective solution for Vulnerability Management I usually answered: “Nessus Professional with some additional automation through Nessus API”.

With just a couple of Nessus Professional scanning nodes it was possible to scan all the infrastructure and network perimeter (see “Vulnerability Management for Network Perimeter“). Price for each node was fixed and reasonable. And you could make your any reports from the raw scan data, as you like it.

Nessus Pro was still were best choice even when Tenable:

  • Cut off master/slave functionality in Nessus and created “Nessus Manager”.
  • Changed API completely during the update from 5 to 6 version.
  • Gradually increased the price from $1,5k to $2,7k per scanning node per year.

But unfortunately it’s not anymore. End of an era.

And what is even more sad is that Tenable does not mention disabling the API and multi-user function in the main Nessus 7 marketing, as it never was, as if it’s not very important. Just look at “Announcing Nessus Professional v7” – not a word  about “API” or users. Only in additional link:

get more information Nessus7

Only there, in the text (not a video) there is an information about removed features.

The nice little things like “Easily transferable license” and “Emailed scan reports and custom report name / logo” do not make it any better.

So, what next?

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