Tag Archives: 0day

Is it possible to detect Zero Day vulnerabilities with Vulnerability Management solutions?

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Hello everyone! In my English-language telegram chat avleonovchat, the question was asked: “How to find zero day vulnerabilities with Qualys?” Apparently this question can be expanded. Not just with Qualys, but with any VM solution in general. And is it even possible? There was an interesting discussion.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239109

Image generated by Stable Diffusion 2.1: “calendar on the wall cyber security vulnerability zero day”

The question is not so straightforward. To answer it, we need to define what a Zero Day vulnerability is. If we look at wikipedia, then historically “0” is the number of days a vendor has to fix a vulnerability.

“Eventually the term was applied to the vulnerabilities that allowed this hacking, and to the number of days that the vendor has had to fix them.”

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0day RCE in Firefox

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This seems like a pretty interesting vulnerability CVE-2019-17026 in Firefox (and Thunderbird) in Windows, MacOS and Linux.

A pretty interesting vulnerability in Firefox (and Thunderbird)

“Incorrect alias information in IonMonkey JIT compiler for setting array elements could lead to a type confusion. We are aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw”.

US-cert informs us that “an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system“. Yep, it’s RCE.

On the one hand, it’s not a big deal, because Firefox will ask you to update it after the next launch.

Firefox will ask you to update it after the next launch

But if somewhere in your organization the old version of Firefox is used because it is the only version that is supported by some legacy application or plugin, you are in hell. Of course, this old browser may be only installed somewhere and not used, but still try to monitor this and take care. Especially if you use some custom Firefox-based build.

Vulnerability Life Cycle and Vulnerability Disclosures

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Vulnerability Life Cycle diagram shows possible states of the vulnerability. In a previous post I suggested to treat vulnerabilities as bugs. Every known vulnerability, as same as every bug, was implemented by some software developer at some moment of time and was fixed at some moment of time later. What happens between this two events?

Vulnerability life-cycle

Right after the vulnerability was implemented in the code by some developer (creation) nobody knows about it. Well, of course, if it was done unintentionally. By the way, making backdoors look like an ordinary vulnerabilities it’s a smart way to do such things. 😉 But let’s say it WAS done unintentionally.

Time passed and some researcher found (discovery) this vulnerability and described it somehow. What’s next? It depends on who was that researcher.

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WannaCry about Vulnerability Management

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Nearly all mainstream media wrote today about massive ransomware attacks around the world: 16 medical institutions in UK, strong rumours that huge companies in Russia, and even Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs suffered a damage.

At this moment Kaspersky recorded more than 45,000 attacks in 74 countries around the world, but mostly in Russia. During the attack WannaCry malware encrypts data with the extension “.WCRY” added to the filename – that’s why it is called this way.

WannaCry CryptoLocker

What I like in this WannaCry story, that it’s actually all about Vulnerability Management.

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Programmers are also people who also make mistakes

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It’s the first part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show “Safe Environment” (or “Safe Wednesday” – kind of wordplay in Russian) recorded 29.03.2017. We were discussing why Software Vulnerabilities are everyone’s problem. Full video in Russian without subtitles is available here.

If we look at who commits, who adds vulnerabilities to the CVE database, they are very different people.

I added manually transcribed Russian/English subtitles to the video:

  • Why vulnerabilities are dangerous for business and for ordinary people?
  • How vulnerabilities appear in programs?
  • How to write code safely?
  • What motivates vulnerability researchers?
  • Vulnerabilities as a first step in writing malicious software

We wanted to talk today about software vulnerabilities. Tell me, what is it all about, why are they dangerous for business, for ordinary people and what are the difficulties with their remediation.

Speaking about vulnerabilities, it’s probably worth to tell how they generally appear in programs.

Let’s say we have a company. This company is developing some software. Some programmers work in it. Programmers are also people who also make mistakes. And if some mistakes that are directly related to the functionality of this application, can be detected quite simply in the testing process…

Are you talking about functional testing?

Yes, it is about functional testing.

QA specialists can quickly find these vulnerabilities, or these problems, these bugs. Some problems can not be detected in such a simple way. For example, some problems related to security.

Why? Because the main task of the programmers: the program should work.

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