Category Archives: Vulnerability

Vulristics: Microsoft Patch Tuesdays Q2 2021

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Vulristics: Microsoft Patch Tuesdays Q2 2021. Hello everyone! Let’s now talk about Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities for the second quarter of 2021. April, May and June. Not the most exciting topic, I agree. I am surprised that someone is reading or watching this. For me personally, this is a kind of tradition. Plus this is an opportunity to try Vulristics in action and find possible problems. It is also interesting to see what VM vendors considered critical back then and what actually became critical. I will try to keep this video short.

First of all, let’s take a look at the vulnerabilities from the April Patch Tuesday. 108 vulnerabilities, 55 of them are RCEs. Half of these RCEs (27) are weird RPC vulnerabilities. “Researcher who reported these bugs certainly found quite the attack surface”. The most critical vulnerability is RCE in Exchange (CVE-2021-28480). This is not ProxyLogon, this is another vulnerability. ProxyLogon was in March. And this vulnerability is simply related to ProxyLogon, so it is believed that it is exploited in the wild as well. In the second place this Win32k Elevation of Privilege (CVE-2021-28310). It is clearly mentioned in several sources as being used in real attacks. “Bugs of this nature are typically combined with other bugs, such as a browser bug or PDF exploit, to take over a system”. And the only vulnerability with a public exploit is the Azure DevOps Server Spoofing (CVE-2021-28459). Previously known as Team Foundation Server (​TFS), Azure DevOps Server is a set of collaborative software development tools. It is hosted on-premises. Therefore, this vulnerability can be useful for attackers.

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Last Week’s Security news: PrintNightmare, Kaseya, Intune, Metasploit Docker escape

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Last Week’s Security news: PrintNightmare, Kaseya, Intune, Metasploit Docker escape. Hello guys! The second episode of Last Week’s Security news from June 28 to July 4.

The most interesting vulnerability of the last week is of course Microsoft Print Spooler “PrintNightmare”. By sending an RpcAddPrinterDriverEx() RPC request, for example over SMB, a remote, authenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges on a vulnerable Windows system. And there is a public PoC exploit for this vulnerability published by the Chinese security firm Sangfor. And there is some strange story. It turns out that Sangfor published an exploit for the 0day vulnerability. But they thought this vulnerability (CVE-2021-1675) had already been patched as part of the June Micorosft Patch Tuesday. And then it turns out that this is a bug in the Microsoft patch. But Microsoft wrote that this is a different, new vulnerability CVE-2021-34527 and so there were no problems with the previous patch. In any case, a patch for this vulnerability has not yet been released and Microsoft is suggesting two Workarounds. Option 1 – Disable the Print Spooler service, Option 2 – Disable inbound remote printing through Group Policy. Do this first for Domain Controllers and other critical Windows servers. All versions of Windows contain the vulnerable code and are susceptible to exploitation. Also note that the new vulnerability has a flag Exploitation Detected on the MS site.

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Last Week’s Security news: Cisco ASA, BIG-IQ, vSphere, Solaris, Dlink, iPhone %s, DarkRadiation, Google schema, John McAfee

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Last Week’s Security news: Cisco ASA, BIG-IQ, vSphere, Solaris, Dlink, iPhone %s, DarkRadiation, Google schema, John McAfee. Hello, today I want to experiment with a new format. I will be reading last week’s news from my @avleonovnews channel, which I found the most interesting. I do this mostly for myself, but if you like it too, then that would be great. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and my Telegram @avleonovcom.

Let’s start with some new public exploits.

  1. Researchers at Positive Technologies have dropped a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit on Twitter for a known cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) CVE-2020-3580. This flaw was patched in October. There are reports of researchers pursuing bug bounties using this exploit. Maybe you should do this too. Well, or at least ask your IT administrators if they have updated the ASA.
  2. F5 BIG-IQ VE Post-auth Remote Root RCE. BIG-IQ provides a single point of management for all your BIG-IP devices — whether they are on premises or in a public or private cloud. It was possible to execute commands with root privileges as an authenticated privileged user via command injection in easy-setup-test-connection. A good reason to check if you have this in the infrastructure. But of course the fact that this is Post-auth makes it less interesting.
  3. VMware vCenter 6.5 / 6.7 / 7.0 Remote Code Execution. From the description of the vulnerability that was published in February 2021. “The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a remote code execution vulnerability in a vCenter Server plugin. A malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts vCenter Server.” Therefore, if your IT colleagues have not patched vCenter since February, you can try to demonstrate how this vulnerability is exploited in practice.
  4. Solaris SunSSH 11.0 Remote Root. “CVE-2020-14871 is a critical pre-authentication (via SSH) stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) in Oracle Solaris. PAM is a dynamic authentication component that was integrated into Solaris back in 1997 as part of Solaris 2.6”. If you are still using Solaris in your infrastructure, this is a great opportunity to try this exploit.
  5. Dlink DSL2750U – ‘Reboot’ Command Injection. There, in the exploit code, there is a link to the full study that shows how the researcher, Mohammed Hadi, gains admin access to the router. This is interesting considering that this router model is quite popular and you can still buy such a router.
  6. It’s 2021 and a printf format string in a wireless network’s name can break iPhone Wi-Fi. On Friday, Carl Schou, a security researcher in Denmark, reported that his iPhone lost its Wi-Fi capability after attempting to connect to a Wi-Fi network named “%p%s%s%s%s%n”. Fortunately, the damage appears not to be permanent. Apple iOS devices that lose Wi-Fi capability after being bitten by this bug can be restored via the General -> Reset -> Reset Network Settings menu option, which reverts network settings to their factory default. Not a very interesting vulnerability in terms of practical exploitation, but fun. Don’t connect to unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks.

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PHDays 10: U.S. Sanctions, My Talk on Vulristics, Other Great Talks Related to VM

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PHDays 10: U.S. Sanctions, My Talk on Vulristics, Other Great Talks Related to VM. Today I will talk about the Positive Hack Days conference, which took place on May 20 and May 21 in Moscow. I can say that this was and remains the main event for Information Security Practitioners in Russia.

First of all, I have to say a few words about the sanctions. The organizer of the event, Positive Technologies, is under the sanctions of the US Treasury Department since April 2021 among the “COMPANIES IN THE TECHNOLOGY SECTOR SUPPORTING RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES”. In a press release, the Treasury Department wrote that Positive Technologies hosts large-scale conventions that are used as recruiting events for russian special services. Well, I don’t know exactly what they mean. Maybe they mean PHDays or maybe not. But to say this about PHDays is like saying that any major international conference, Black Hat or RSA, is a recruiting event. This is ridiculous. In my humble opinion, these are some dirty political games. It is sad that reputable information security companies and security researchers are suffering from this.

Now let’s talk about my speech at PHDays 10. This year I had the opportunity to talk for an hour about my pet project – Vulristics. This project can help you prioritize known vulnerabilities. Anything that has a CVE id. There is a full video of my speech. I have uploaded this to my YouTube channel.

Russian version.

And a version that was dubbed into English.

So, if you’re interested, I recommend watching the full video. Here I will simply repeat the main points.

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AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 2: What was I talking about there

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AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 2: What was I talking about there. Hello all! It is the second part about AM Live Vulnerability Management conference. In the first part I made the timecodes for the 2 hours video in Russian. Here I have combined all my lines into one text.

What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability Management process is the opposite of the admin’s saying “If it works – don’t touch it!”. The main idea of this process is to somehow fix the vulnerabilities. How do you achieve this is not so important. Maybe you will have a nice Plan-Do-Check-Act process and strict policies. Maybe not. The main thing is that you fix vulnerabilities! And the main problem is to negotiate this regular patching with system administrators and service owners.

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AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 1: Full video in Russian + Timecodes in English

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AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 1: Full video in Russian + Timecodes in English. Hello all! 2 weeks ago I participated in the best online event fully dedicated to Vulnerability Management in Russia. It was super fun and exciting. Thanks to all the colleagues and especially to Lev Paley for the great moderation! I have talked out completely. Everything I wanted and the way I wanted. It seems that not a single hot topic was missed.

AM LIve: Vulnerability Management conference

You can see the two hours video below. It is in Russian. And it’s pretty complicated to translate it all. I won’t event try. ? If you don’t understand Russian you can try auto-generated and auto-translated subtitles on YouTube, but the quality is far from ideal.

To give you the idea what we were talking about I added the timecodes in English.

Timecodes

Section 1. Vulnerability Management Process and Solutions

  • 5:18 Vulnerability Management Process Definition
  • 10:53 Vulnerability Management is the opposite of the admin’s saying “If it works – don’t touch it!” The main thing in the process is to somehow fix the vulnerabilities. (Leonov)
  • 12:30 Sometimes a basic vulnerability scanner and Jira is already a Vulnerability Management solution (Leonov)
  • 13:30 Difference between Vulnerability Management Solutions and Vulnerability Scanners
  • 17:09 Vulnerability Management and Vulnerability Scanners: “in our restaurant we call rusks “croutons”, because a rusk cannot cost $8, but crouton can“ (Leonov)
  • 23:00 Licensing schemes, delivery options and costs
  • 28:48 Module-based licensing and the situations when modules can be excluded from the subscription (Paley)
  • 30:24 Commercial Vulnerability Management solutions are expensive, especially when licensed per host (Leonov)
  • 31:00 Maxpatrol unlimited licenses (Bengin)
  • 34:08 Perimeter scanning: very critical, low reliability of banner-based detections, it’s better to assess hosts accessible from the Internet with internal authenticated scans. Criticality of the network as an element of scoring. (Leonov)
  • 36:50 The impact of Regulators on the Vulnerability Management Market, a free ScanOVAL tool
  • 39:10 What to do with vulnerabilities in local software products that are not supported by foreign VM vendors?
  • 44:00 When it’s enough to use a free scanner? Could there be a full-functional and free vulnerability scanner? In theory, yes, but it is not clear how the vendor will finance the maintenance of the knowledge base. In practice, we see how such stories collapse. You need to understand the limitations of free products (such as OpenVAS). Including the completeness of the scan results and the ease of building the VM process. (Leonov)
  • 47:19 Poll: what is used in your organization?

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Vulristics: Beyond Microsoft Patch Tuesdays, Analyzing Arbitrary CVEs

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Vulristics: Beyond Microsoft Patch Tuesdays, Analyzing Arbitrary CVEs. Hello everyone! In this episode I would like to share an update for my Vulristics project.

For those who don’t know, in this project I am working on an alternative vulnerability scoring based on publicly available data to highlight vulnerabilities that need to be fixed as soon as possible. Roughly speaking, this is something like Tenable VPR, but more transparent and even open source. Currently it works with much less data sources. It mainly depends on the type of vulnerability, the prevalence of vulnerable software, public exploits and exploitation in the wild.

Elevation of Privilege - Windows Win32k

I started with Microsoft PatchTuesday Vulnerabilities because Microsoft provides much better data than other vendors. They have the type of vulnerability and the name of the vulnerable software in the title.

Elevation of Privilege - Windows Win32k MS site

But it’s time to go further and now you can use Vulristics to analyze any set of CVEs. I changed the scirpts that were closely related to the Microsoft datasource and added new features to get the type of vulnerability and name of the software from the CVE description.

Elevation of Privilege - Sudo (CVE-2021-3156) - High [595]

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