Today Tenable released a new version of their famous vulnerability scanner – Nessus 8. The existing scanner nodes don’t see the updates yet, but the installation binaries are already available. So you may try to install it.
This major release will be way more positive than the previous one. Of course Tenable did NOT return the multi-user mode and API in Nessus Professional. But on the other hand, they did NOT cut the functionality even further. They even added new features in GUI. And, what is the most important, they did NOT switch to the assets-based licensing (at least yet). 🙂
Let’s say we have a Splunk dashboard with multiple panels. Each panel has its own search request and all of these requests work independently and simultaneously. If they are complex enough, rendering the dashboard may take quite a long time and some panels may even fall by timeout.
How to avoid this? The first step is to understand how the searches are related. May be it is possible to select some base searches, and reuse their results in other child-searches. It’s also possible to get cached results from the “Saved Searches” (another name of Reports in Splunk GUI).
However, this manual operations can make the process of debugging dashboards really annoying. It would be much easier to send dashboard XML content to Splunk using Splunk API. And it is actually possible. 🙂
Last Thursday, September 20th, I spoke at ISACA Moscow “Vulnerability Management” Meetup held at Polytechnic University. The only event in Moscow devoted solely to Vulnerability Management. So I just had to take part in it. 🙂
The target audience of the event – people who implement the vulnerability management process in organizations and the employees of Vulnerability Management vendors. I noticed groups of people from Altex-Soft (Altx-Soft), Positive Technologies and Vulners.
It was very interesting to see such concentration of Vulnerability and Compliance Management specialists in one place. Questions from the audience were relevant and often concerned the weaknesses of competitors. 😉 Here I will make a brief overview of the reports. You can also read here about previous year event at “ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2017“.
Talking about the audience, there were fewer people than last year, but still a lot:
The event was recorded. I will add video here as soon as it’s ready.
upd. Video in Russian. My presentation starts at 1:35:56
The event was conducted entirely in Russian, including all the slides. So, maybe I will make English subtitles and voiceover, at least for my part.
In my opinion, Remediation is the most difficult part of Vulnerability Management process. If you know the assets in your organization and can assess them, you will sooner or later produce a good enough flow of critical vulnerabilities. But what the point, if the IT team will not fix them?
Kübler-Ross model and Tsunami of Vulnerability Remediation Tasks
Just think about it. The only thing that your colleagues from IT team see is an unexpected tsunami of the patching tasks. They most likely don’t understand WHY they should do it. They most likely don’t know about the concepts of Attack Surface minimization and Attack Cost maximization. From their point of view it’s just some stupid requirements from InfoSec team imposed with only one goal – to make their life miserable.
So, they may think that denial and pushing back can solve all their problems. And, frankly, this may work. There are countless ways to sabotage Vulnerability Remediation. Most main and common are the following:
I don’t understand how to patch this.
I already patched this, there should be a false positive in the scanner.
Why should we patch this? The vulnerability is not exploitable. Or it is exploitable in theory, but not exploitable in our particular infrastructure. Or this server is not critical and, even if it will be compromised, there won’t be a huge impact. So, we will not patch it.
In each individual case Vulnerability Analyst can describe and proof his point, but doing this for each vulnerability will require insane amount of time and efforts and will paralyze the work. It is basically the Italian strike or work-to-rule.
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