Category Archives: Topics

Processing Vulners collections using Python

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Processing Vulners collections using Python. Vulners collection is a zip archive containing all available objects of some type (e.g. CentOS security bulletins or OpenVAS detection plugins) from the Vulners Knowledge Base. Let’s see how to work with this data using powerful Python scripting language. You can read more about Vulners itself at “Vulners – Google for hacker“.

Vulners Collections and python

All collections are listed at https://vulners.com/#stats:

Vulners Stats

Note a gray icon with black arrow. Press it to download particular vulners collection.

OpenVAS collection link: https://vulners.com/api/v3/archive/collection/?type=openvas

If you need to get all objects for further analysis, you don’t need to make huge amount simmilar Search API requests. You just need to download one file. It’s takes less time and efforts and makes less load on Vulners service.
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F-Secure API for scanning

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F-Secure API for scanning. This post will be about API of F-Secure Radar. API become a crucial feature when you have to scan a range of thousands hosts and you can’t just add it in one Vulnerability Scanning task. As I mentioned earlier in “F-Secure Radar Vulnerability Management solution” Vulnerability Scanning in Radar is for known active IPs only, for ranges – Discovery Scans. Basically, in F-Secure Radar there is always one vulnerability scan for one host. Unusual concept, but it have some advantages. And it’s quite convenient when you work with Radar via API.

So, my plan for this post is to get active IPs from discovery scan report, create vulnerability scans, run them and get reports. All using API.

To use API you need to get API key at “F-Secure Radar -> Settings -> My profile”.

F-Secure Radar API key

To check that API is working we may send a request:

GET /v1/Scans/Types HTTP/1.1
Host: api.radar.f-secure.com
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
UserName: radar_user@corporation.com
APIKey: JDOBH9MV24ZOENMS94QCO8QP

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Nessus API for hosts scanning

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Nessus API for hosts scanning. When I was writing earlier about Nessus API (“Retrieving scan results through Nessus API“) I have not mentioned how to create a new vulnerability scan task and launch it fully automatically. I assumed that all vulnerability scan entities was already created and scheduled in GUI, how it is often happens in a real life. However, managing the scans via Nessus API (run, pause, resume, stop) may be also useful, for example, when we need to automatically update vulnerability status of some host. Creating scan policy with API will be still out of scope of this post. We assume, that scan policy already exists.

Nessus API for scan management

API Description is still at https://192.168.56.101:8834/api# (where 192.168.56.101 is the IP address of your Nessus host). How to install Nessus read in “Tenable Nessus: registration, installation, scanning and reporting“.

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Qualys Vulnerability Management GUI and API

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Qualys Vulnerability Management GUI and API. It has been a long time since I wrote something about Qualys, but today I will write not just about their free product or service, like SSL Labs, but about the main Cloud Platform.

Qualys VM GUI and API

Qualys pioneered cloud Vulnerability Management. How the cloud VM works? In simple terms, there is a web portal https://qualysguard.qualys.com (or .eu for Europe). You can login there, specify a list of IP addresses you want to check and Qualys server(-s) will scan this hosts and show you a vulnerability report.

Qualys Login

Ok, it’s clear with perimeter, but what if some hosts are only accessible from your internal network? In this case, you need to purchase Qualys network appliance, which will communicate Qualys server (read more at “Using Qualys Virtual Appliance“). You create a scan task on Qualys web portal to scan hosts in your internal network, Qualys server gives an order to appliance to gather information about these hosts and to send it back to the server for analysis. Most of the security analysis is done “in the cloud” by remote Qualys servers. End-user manage VM service either through Qualys  web-portal GUI, or API.

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Export anything to Splunk with HTTP Event Collector

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Export anything to Splunk with HTTP Event Collector. In a previous post I described how to export Nessus scan reports to Splunk server using standard app. Today let’s see how to export any structured data presented in JSON, including of course Nessus scan reports, to Splunk using HTTP Event Collector.

http event collector Splunk

First of all, we should create new HTTP Event Collector

http://your_splunk_host:8000/en-US/manager/launcher/http-eventcollector

And press “New Token” button

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Tenable SecurityCenter and its API

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Tenable SecurityCenter and its API. SecurityCenter is an enterprise level vulnerability management product of Tenable Network Security. As the name implies, the it is designed to be the center of Tenable security infrastructure. SecurityCenter takes data from other Tenable products: Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS), Log Correlation Engine (LCE), Nessus, and provides a powerful GUI interface for searching and reporting. Sounds familiar? Well, yes, it is something like SIEM, but with a strong emphasis on Vulnerability Management.

Tenable SecurityCenter 5

I’ve took this screenshot from SC5 video presentation in Spanish.

In this post, I certainly will not fully cover SC functionality and all the features of its API. I just would like to pay tribute to a convenient asset mechanism of SecurityCenter and show very basic operation of SecurityCenter API: retrieving the results of the vulnerability scanning (as I did it for Nessus in “Retrieving scan results through Nessus API“).
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Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner

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Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner. This will be a practical confirmation of my thesis from “Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side“: the scanner for one operating system is easy to make. I also want to demonstrate that data collection and data analysis for Vulnerability Assessment may be successfully performed separately. There is no need to take the data directly from the vulnerable hosts, when it is already stored somewhere else, for example in IT monitoring systems.

Assessment without vulnerability scanner

The opacity of data collection and the need to have a privileged account on the remote host, traditionally causes conflicts between IS and IT departments and complicates implementation of VM process.

So, to detect vulnerabilities on our Linux host we need to know what version of the packages contain vulnerabilities, which versions of packages are installed on our hosts, and learn how to compare versions.

How do I know which versions of packages are vulnerable?

Vulnerable versions of packages are listed in official security bulletins:
RHEL – https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016:0304
CentOS – https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2015-April/021064.html
Debian – http://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3197
Ubuntu – http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2537-1/

CESA bulletin example

Of course, you will need to parse them first. Or you can just download the same content already parsed and presented in JSON format with Vulners.
download CESA bulletins from Vulners
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