Harassment scandals, Sheldon Cooper, Black Mirror and blockchain

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Harassment scandals, Sheldon Cooper, Black Mirror and blockchain. Lots of good jokes in a popular TV show The Big Bang Theory are related to Sheldon Cooper’s bureaucracy in interpersonal relationships: all these “roommate agreement”, “relationship agreement”, etc.

Harassment scandals, Sheldon Cooper, Black Mirror and blockchain

However, because of these endless harassment scandals in media, now it seems like a best practice of some kind. 😉

roommate agreement

I’m not particularly interested in who is right or wrong in any particular scandal. But the scheme itself seems corrupted.

In the current reality, when any joint action can be post factum presented as violent and committed under pressure, even after 10-20 years, and can lead to very sad consequences, any oral arrangements are rapidly depreciating.

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Vulnerability Management vendors and massive Malware attacks (following the Bad Rabbit)

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Vulnerability Management vendors and massive Malware attacks (following the Bad Rabbit). After the latest Bad Rabbit ransomware attack all Top VM vendors Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7 wrote blog posts on this topic on the same day. Two days later Tripwire also published own  review. Why do they care? They do not make antiviruses, endpoint protection or firewalls – the common tools against this kind of threats. So, what’s the point?

VM vendors BadRabbit

Well, they do it is obviously to promote their products and services. But how exactly?

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Study Vulnerability Assessment in Tenable University for free

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Study Vulnerability Assessment in Tenable University for free. Not so long ago, Tenable presented renewed online training platform – Tenable University. It is publicly available even for non-customers, for example, for Nessus Home users. However, not all courses are available in this case.

Login screen

I decided to check it out, registering as non-customer.

Sign up

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Exploitability attributes of Nessus plugins: good, bad and Vulners

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Exploitability attributes of Nessus plugins: good, bad and Vulners. Exploitability is one of the most important criteria for prioritizing vulnerabilities. Let’s see how good is the exploit-related data of Tenable Nessus NASL plugins and whether we can do it better.

Nessus exploitability

What are the attributes related to exploits? To understand this, I parsed all nasl plugins and got the following results.

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Starting/stopping Amazon EC2 instances using CLI and Python SDK

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Starting/stopping Amazon EC2 instances using CLI and Python SDK. It’s a very good practice to scan your perimeter from the outside of your network, simulating an attacker. However, you will need to deploy the scanners somewhere to do this. Hosting on Amazon EC2 can be a good and cost-effective option, especially if you start instances with vulnerability scanners only when it’s necessary and keep them stopped at other time.

Amazon AWS python

So, in this post I will give some examples of how to manage Amazon instances automatically using the AWS CLI or Python SDK (boto3): start/stop the instance and get public ip address.

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ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2017

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ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2017. Last Thursday, I attended a very interesting event entirely dedicated to Vulnerability Management – open ISACA Moscow meetup. Me and my former colleague from Mail.Ru Group Dmitry Chernobaj presented there our joint report “Enterprise Vulnerability Management: fancy marketing brochures and the real-life troubles”.

The number of registered participants totaled 120. As I can tell looking at the photo below, there were about 80 people in the hall after the second presentation. For a highly focused local information security event, it’s a lot. According to the organizers, it was the largest ISACA Moscow meetup. Thanks to everyone who came!

ISACA VM Meetup Auditorium

I would like to mention a well-structured agenda. There were 4 presentations arranged in order: from the most theoretical / methodical to the most practical. And our presentation was the last one.

Oleg Boyko started the event. He was talking about the place of Vulnerability Management in COBIT 5 framework. I don’t know COBIT good enough to comment on this. The main thing I’ve noticed is that among the 37 COBIT 5 processes, there is no a process for managing the vulnerabilities, such as Manage Assets or Manage Configurations.

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CWEs in NVD CVE feed: analysis and complaints

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CWEs in NVD CVE feed: analysis and complaints. As you probably know, one of the ways to describe the nature of some software vulnerability is to provide corresponding CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) ids. Let’s see the CWE links in NVD CVE base.

NVD CWEs

I have already wrote earlier how to deal with NVD feed using python in “Downloading and analyzing NVD CVE feed“. You can easily get CWEs ids iterating over cve_dict['CVE_Items'].

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