Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2022

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2022. I release it pretty late, because of the my previous big episode about the blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners. Please take a look if you haven’t seen it. Well, if you are even slightly interested in the world news, you can imagine that the end of February 2022 in Eastern Europe is not the best time to create new content on Vulnerability Management. Let’s hope that peace and tranquility will be restored soon. And also that geopolitical confrontation between the largest nuclear powers will de-escalate somehow.

But let’s get back to information security. While working on Microsoft Patch Tuesday report for February 2022, I made a lot of improvements to my open source project for vulnerability prioritization Vulristics. I want to start with them.

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VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners

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Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf22 Vulnerability Management conference. I want to talk about the blind spots in the knowledge bases of Vulnerability Scanners and Vulnerability Management products.

This report was presented in Russian at Tenable Security Day 2022. The video is here.

Potential customers rarely worry about the completeness of the Knowledge Base when choosing a Vulnerability Scanner. They usually trust the VM vendors’ claims of the “largest vulnerability base” and the total number of detection plugins. But in fact the completeness is very important. All high-level vulnerability prioritization features are meaningless unless the vulnerability has been reliably detected. In this presentation, I will show the examples of blindspots in the knowledge bases of vulnerability management products, try to describe the causes and what we (as customers and the community) can do about it.

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End of CentOS Linux. Where to migrate?

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Hello everyone! As you probably know, CentOS Linux, the main Enterprise-level Linux server distribution, will soon disappear. It wasn’t hard to predict when RedHat acquired CentOS in 2014, and now it is actually happening. End of life of CentOS Linux 8 was 31.12.2021. There won’t be CentOS Linux as downstream for RedHat anymore. Only CentOS Stream, that will be upstream for RedHat, more or less a testing distro like Fedora.

Of course, it is a matter of debate whether security guys can actually decide which Linux distributions a company will use and set that as a requirement. But in any case, the security guys will definitely take part in the decision. I made a poll in my Telegram channel. 113 people voted. So, let’s take a look at the results and discuss which of the Linux distributions we can recommend to IT teams.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday January 2022

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for January 2022. Traditionally, I will use my open source Vulristics tool for analysis. This time I didn’t make any changes to how connectors work. The report generation worked correctly on the first try.

python3.8 vulristics.py --report-type "ms_patch_tuesday" --mspt-year 2022 --mspt-month "January" --rewrite-flag "True"

The only thing I have improved is the detection of types of vulnerabilities and vulnerable products. “Unknown Vulnerability Type” was for two vulnerabilities, so I added the “Elevation Of Privilege” и “Cross-Site Scripting” spelling options. I added detections for 13 products and 19 Windows components. I also corrected the method for sorting vulnerabilities with the same Vulristics score. Previously, such vulnerabilities were sorted by CVE id, now they are sorted by vulnerability type and product. This allows you to see the clusters of similar vulnerabilities.

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VMconf 22: Why Didn’t It Work As Planned and What’s Next?

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Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about VMconf 22. It was an experiment from the beginning. Is it possible to host a Vulnerability Management event with little effort and budget? Looks like no. So I would like to talk about why the original idea failed and the future of VMconf.

The initial idea was to create a website, announce the launch of the CFP in social networks and everything else will happen automatically. People will apply and all that remains is to choose the best talks and manage the stream of the event. Well, no, not really.

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Log4j “Log4Shell” RCE explained (CVE-2021-44228)

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Hello everyone! I decided to make a separate episode about Log4Shell. Of course, there have already been many reviews of this vulnerability. But I do it primarily for myself. It seems to me that serious problems with Log4j and similar libraries will be with us for a long time. Therefore, it would be interesting to document how it all began. So what is the root cause of Log4Shell?

Logs

Generally speaking, the IT infrastructure of any company deals with streams of input data. From user requests to a corporate website to integration with banking APIs and cloud services. A lot of data gets into the infrastructure of the company, is transferred from system to system, periodically getting into the logs. These logs are required to verify that the systems are functioning correctly.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday December 2021

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Hello everyone! It’s even strange to talk about other vulnerabilities, while everyone is so focused on vulnerabilities in log4j. But life doesn’t stop. Other vulnerabilities appear every day. And of course, there are many critical ones among them that require immediate patching. This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for December 2021.

I will traditionally use my open source Vulristics tool for analysis.

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