Category Archives: Video

Microsoft Patch Tuesday May 2020: comments from VM vendors, promising stuff for phishing, troubles with SharePoint and lulz with Visual Studio

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This will be my third Microsoft Patch Tuesday report in video and audio format. And for the third time in a row, Microsoft has addressed over a hundred vulnerabilities. With my Microsoft Patch Tuesday parser, it was possible to generate a report almost on the same day. But, of course, it takes much more time to describe the vulnerabilities manually.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday May 2020
  • All vulnerabilities: 111
  • Critical: 16
  • Important: 95
  • Moderate: 0
  • Low: 0

Last time I complained that different VM vendors release completely different reports for Microsoft Patch Tuesday. This time I decided that it’s not a bug, but a feature. I upgraded my script to not only show vulnerabilities, but also show how these vulnerabilities were mentioned in the reports of various VM vendors (Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7 and ZDI). In my opinion, it seems pretty useful.

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Anti-Phishing process with advanced phishing attacks simulation

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This time I want to write about the service of my friends from Antiphish. They call it “security awareness and employee behaviour management platform”. Simply put, they teach company employees how to detect and avoid phishing attacks.

By the way, they are great guys, made a demo for me, prepared custom templates, like in real PoC for a corporate client. Thanks so much for the excellent work!

The main idea

When you sign in to the Antiphish interface, you see the dashboards with information about the people who studied security courses, were tested during the course and were checked using emulated phishing attacks (some of these attacks are amazing, and I’ll show them at the end). This is the main idea. How can you protect your organization from phishing attacks? Educate people and constantly provoke them. Not just to send an email and see the employees who visited your “malicious” website. No, there should be a process!

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 “Wormable” RCE and updates for February goldies

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SMBv3 “Wormable” RCE

Without a doubt, the hottest Microsoft vulnerability in March 2020 is the “Wormable” Remote Code Execution in SMB v3 CVE-2020-0796. The most commonly used names for this vulnerability are EternalDarkness, SMBGhost and CoronaBlue.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 "Wormable" RCE and updates for February goldies

There was a strange story of how it was disclosed. It seems like Microsoft accidentally mentioned it in their blog. Than they somehow found out that the patch for this vulnerability will not be released in the March Patch Tuesday. So, they removed the reference to this vulnerability from the blogpost as quickly as they could.

But some security experts have seen it. And, of course, after EternalBlue and massive cryptolocker attacks in 2017, each RCE in SMB means “OMG, this is happening again, we need to do something really fast!” So, Microsoft just had to publish an advisory for this vulnerability with the workaround ADV200005 and to release an urgent patch KB4551762.

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Parsing Nessus v2 XML reports with python

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Upd. This is an updated post from 2017. The original script worked pretty well for me until the most recent moment when I needed to get compliance data from Nessus scan reports, and it failed. So I researched how this information is stored in a file, changed my script a bit, and now I want to share it with you.

Previous post about Nessus v2 reports I was writing mainly about the format itself. Now let’s see how you can parse them with Python.

Please don’t work with XML documents the same way you process text files. I adore bash scripting and awk, but that’s an awful idea to use it for XML parsing. In Python you can do it much easier and the script will work much faster. I will use lxml library for this.

So, let’s assume that we have Nessus xml report. We could get it using Nessus API (upd. API is not officially supported in Nessus Professional since version 7) or SecurityCenter API. First of all, we need to read content of the file.

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Forrester report for Rapid7: number juggling and an excellent overview of Vulnerability Management problems

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I recently read Forrester’s 20-page report “The Total Economic Impact™ Of Rapid7 InsightVM“. It is about the Cost Savings And Business Benefits that Vulnerability Management solution can bring to the organizations.

Forrester report for Rapid7

In short, I didn’t like everything related to money. It seems like juggling with numbers, useless and boring. But I really liked the quotes from customers who criticized existing Vulnerability Management solutions, especially the low quality of the remediation data. These are the real pain points of Vulnerability Management process.

How did Forrester count money?

Forrester interviewed five existing customers of Rapid7 and created a “composite organization”.

This “composite organization” has 12,000 IT assets and spends $223,374 per year on Rapid7 InsightVM ($670,123 for 3 years) including integrations and trainings costs. That means $18 per host. Well, quite a lot, especially when compared to unlimited Nessus Professional for just $2,390 per year. A wonderland of Enterprise Vulnerability Management. 🙂

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Is Vulnerability Management more about Vulnerabilities or Management?

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I’ve just read a nice article about Vulnerability Management in the Acribia blog (in Russian). An extract and my comments below.

In the most cases Vulnerability Management is not about Vulnerabilities, but about Management. Just filtering the most critical vulnerabilities is not enough.

Practical Cases:

  1. “Oh, yes, we know ourselves that that everything is bad!” – CVE-2013−4786 IPMI password hash disclosure on > 500 servers. Customer just accepted the risks, Acribia proposed an effective workaround (unbrutable user IDs and passwords). It’s often hard to figure out right remediation measures and implement them. Someone should do it!
  2. “We can download OpenVAS without your help!” – CVE-2018-0171 Cisco Smart Install RCE on 350 hosts. Vulnerability detection rules of several Vulnerability Scanners were not good enough to detect this vulnerability. Do not rely on scanners, know how they work and their limitations.
  3. “If the attackers wanted to hack us, they would have already done it!” – CVE-2017-0144 (MS17-010) Windows SMB RCE on domain controller and several other critical servers. Vulnerability was detected in infrastructure several times, the remediation was agreed with the management, but it was ignored by responsible IT guys. As a result, during the next successful WannaCry-like malware attack the servers, including the DC were destroyed. Vulnerability Management is about the willingness to patch anything, very quickly, as often as required. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

PHDays 9: new methods of Vulnerability Prioritization in Vulnerability Management products

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On May 21, I spoke at the PHDays 9 conference. I talked about new methods of Vulnerability Prioritization in the products of Vulnerability Management vendors.

PHDays9 new ways of prioritizing vulnerabilities

During my 15 minutes time slot I defined the problems that this new technology has to solve, showed why these problems could NOT be solved using existing frameworks (CVSS), described what we currently have on the market and, as usual, criticized VM vendors and theirs solutions a little bit. 🙂

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