Hello everyone! After 4 episodes of the Last Week’s Security news, I decided to change the format. I will no longer try to cover all the important news, because it takes a long time to prepare such reviews. So, from now on, I will focus only on a few news of the past week, which I subjectively consider the most interesting.
So, the last week, July 19 – July 25. In my opinion, the most interesting news was the scandal related to the iPhone Pegasus spyware and two Elevations of Privileges: SeriousSAM for Windows and Sequoia for Linux.
The Gartner Vulnerability Management Reports are one of the few marketing reports that I try to read regularly. This started back in the days when I was working for a VM vendor doing competitive analysis. Gartner is one of the few organizations that think about Vulnerability Assessment and Vulnerability Management and clearly articulate where we are and where we are going.
I got a free reprint of “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment” from the Tenable website. Thanks a lot to them for that.
Let’s start with what I liked:
It’s great that Gartner has made vulnerability prioritization technology (VPT) a separate class of solutions, that do not detect vulnerabilities themselves, but work with them. For example, Kenna or my Vulristics. And it could be additional functionality like Tenable VPR.
I liked the focus on EDR as a promising VM replacement. Especially, Microsoft solutions (Defender for Endpoint or as was mentioned in the report Microsoft’s Threat & Vulnerability Management, TVM).
It’s nice that various areas related to Vulnerability Management have been mentioned: Pentest, Bug Bounty, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS).
An interesting diagram that shows that VA is primarily about “Assess” and “Asset Management”, VPT is primarily about “Prioritize” and “Workflow Management”, BAS is primarily about “Compensate” and “Security Controls”.
Now what I didn’t like. I have one pain point – the quality of the scanning. And here, on the one hand, something was said, but on the other, it was not enough and not as definite as I would like. Market Direction is the most interesting section of the document. And it was the most painful to read.
Hello guys! The fourth episode of Last Week’s Security news, July 12 – July 18.
I would like to start with some new public exploits. I think these 4 are the most interesting.
If you remember, 2 weeks ago I mentioned the ForgeRock Access Manager and OpenAM vulnerability (CVE-2021-35464). Now there is a public RCE exploit for it. ForgeRock OpenAM server is a popular access management solution for web applications. Michael Stepankin, Researcher: “In short, RCE is possible thanks to unsafe Java deserialization in the Jato framework used by OpenAM”. And now this vulnerability is Under Active Attack. “The [Australian Cyber Security Centre] has observed actors exploiting this vulnerability to compromise multiple hosts and deploy additional malware and tools,” the organization said in an alert. ACSC didn’t disclose the nature of the attacks, how widespread they are, or the identities of the threat actors exploiting them”.
A new exploit for vSphere Client (CVE-2021-21985). The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a remote code execution vulnerability due to lack of input validation in the Virtual SAN Health Check plug-in which is enabled by default in vCenter Server. 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.
Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 – Open Redirect (CVE-2018-11784). “When the default servlet in Apache Tomcat […] returned a redirect to a directory […] a specially crafted URL could be used to cause the redirect to be generated to any URI of the attackers choice”.
Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 – Cross-Site Scripting (CVE-2019-0221). “The SSI printenv command in Apache Tomcat […] echoes user provided data without escaping and is, therefore, vulnerable to XSS”. However, in real life this is unlikely to be used. “SSI is disabled by default. The printenv command is intended for debugging and is unlikely to be present in a production website”.
Hello everyone! For the past 9 months, I’ve been doing Microsoft Patch Tuesday reviews quarterly. Now I think it would be better to review the July Patch Tuesday while the topic is still fresh. And that will save us some time in the next Last Week’s Security news episode. So, July Patch Tuesday, 116 vulnerabilities.
The 2 most critical are the Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-31979, CVE-2021-33771). These vulnerabilities are critical because they are used in real attacks according to Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center and Security Response Center. Tenable: “A local, authenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to run processes with elevated permissions. Similar zero-day vulnerabilities were patched in April 2020, which were observed under active exploitation by Google Project Zero.”
Hello guys! The third episode of Last Week’s Security news, July 5 – July 11. There was a lot of news last week. Most of them was again about PrintNightmare and Kaseya.
The updates for PrintNightmare (CVE-2021-34527) were finally released mid-week. It became possible not only to disable the service, but also to update the hosts. This is especially important for desktops that need to print something. But the problem is that these patches can be bypassed. “If you have a system where PointAndPrint NoWarningNoElevationOnInstall = 1, then Microsoft’s patch for #PrintNightmare CVE-2021-34527 does nothing to prevent either LPE or RCE”. Microsoft has updated their security update guide after that: “if you set this reg key to = 1 then the system is vulnerable by design”. It seems that solving this problem requires hardening and registry monitoring.
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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