Tag Archives: CentOS

Seccubus installation and GUI overview

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Seccubus installation and GUI overview. Seccubus can be roughly described as an open source analogue of Tenable SecurityCenter. Look, it can launch scans via APIs of Nessus, OpenVAS, and some other scanning tools, retrieve scan results, parse them and put in MySQL database. Then you can make SQL queries and work with scans in asset-based way (as you know, it is trending now).

Seccubus

Well, Seccubus is not yet a fancy-looking security product. You will need to spend some time to install and configure it, but still it is a very interesting project with a great potential.

Seccubus also may serve as open project that will accumulate expertise in API usage for various Vulnerability Scanners. Another project of such kind is OpenVAS, it’s OSPd scripts and connectors.

In this post I will describe installation process an show elements of GUI web-interface.

I installed Seccubus in CentOS 6 x86_64. I also tried CentOS 6 i386 and it worked fine. However, I can’t recommend you to install official Seccubus packages in CentOS 7 and the latest Debian-based systems. I had some issues with dependencies and Apache configuration. It seems like these systems are not fully supported yet. Security patches for CentOS 6.8 will be available until 30 Nov 2020, so anyway we have time.

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Qualys authenticated scanning

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Qualys authenticated scanning. Let’s see how authenticated scanning works in Qualys. Nessus stores scanning credentials in related Scan Policy (see “Tenable Nessus: registration, installation, scanning and reporting“). Iit’s not always convenient. In Qualys you can set up a scanning record and configure for which hosts it will be used.

Login Credentials

I downloaded Qualys Virtual Scanning Appliance VirtualBox image  and configured it as it was described in “Using Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance“. The only difference: I configured second network device as VirtualBox “Host Only Adapter” to scan virtual machines on my host. You can see how to configure VirtualBox “Host Only Adapter” in my post here.

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F-Secure Radar Vulnerability Management solution

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F-Secure Radar Vulnerability Management solution. In this blog I am writing mainly about VM market leaders. Most of them are US-based companies. However, there are vulnerability management solutions that are popular only in some particular country or region. About some of them you maybe have not even heard. At the same time, these solutions are rather interesting.

F-Secure Radar Dashboards

Vulnerability Scanner I want to present today, was initially developed by nSence company from Espoo, Finland. It was named “Karhu”, a “bear” in Finnish. In June 2015 antivirus company F-Secure has bought nSense and formed it’s Cyber Security Services department. The scanner was renamed in F-Secure Radar. Not to be confused with IBM QRadar SIEM 😉

Solution structure is similar to Qualys and Nessus Cloud. There is a remote server that provides a web interface: portal.radar.f-secure.com. You can scan your perimeter using the remote scanner. To scan the hosts within the network, you should deploy the Scan Node Agent on a Windows host.

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New Vulners.com services for Linux Security Audit and Vulnerability Alerting

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New Vulners.com services for Linux Security Audit and Vulnerability Alerting. Upd. This post is out of date! Check out “Vulners Linux Audit API for Host Vulnerability Detection: Manual Auditing, Python Scripting and Licensing” from 2021.

A few weeks ago I was describing how to perform Linux Vulnerability Assessment without a Vulnerability Scanner. I also wrote in “Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side” that vulnerability scanning is not rocket science and it is easy to make your own scanner for vulnerabilities for a particular OS. Especially it is a popular Linux Distribution.

But. It’s one thing to write that you can do it, and another thing to develop a script for home use, and quite another thing to make a publicly available and efficient service…

Vulners Team guys have actually created such free Linux Vulnerability Audit service!

Linux Vulnerability Audit Service

First of all, they made a GUI where you can specify OS version (usually it is in the /etc/os-release file), list of packages installed on the host and get the list of vulnerabilities.

For example, here are the vulnerabilities for my Ubuntu Laptop, which I update frequently:

Ubuntu Vulners Linux Audit Input

One vulnerability was found:

Ubuntu Vulners Linux Audit Results

But GUI is good for demonstration. In real life, you can use Vulners Audit API. It will return list of vulnerabilities in JSON.

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Dealing with Qualys Cloud Agents

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Dealing with Qualys Cloud Agents. Today I would like to write about Qualys agent-based VM scanning. Agent-based scanning is a relatively new trend among VM vendors. At the beginning of Vulnerability Assessment, there was a prevailing view that the agentless scanning is more convenient for the users: you do not need to install anything on the host, just get credentials and you are ready to scan.

Qualys Cloud Agents logo

However, time passed and it now appears that installing agents on all hosts, where it is technically possible, may be easier, than managing credentials for authenticated scanning. Don’t forget the fact that almost all agentless scanning solutions require scanning account with root/admin privileges, and it’s not an easy task to minimize permissions of this accounts while keeping all functional capabilities of the scanner.

In recent years almost all major VM vendors who previously were promoting agentless scanning have also proposed agent-based solutions.

The main purposes of these solutions are:

  • scan devices that periodically connect to the enterprise network and it’s hard to catch them with traditional active scan (for example, laptop);
  • scan business critical hosts for which it is impossible to get scanning credentials.

VM vendors have taken different approaches for agent-based scanning. For example, Tenable agents are technically very similar to Nessus installations without web interface (read more at “Nessus Manager and Agents“), limited to can scan only the localhost. This seems reasonable, because historically Nessus scanner is available for many platforms, including Windows, Linux, MacOS. Qualys chose other way. They made minimalistic agents for data gathering, processing it on the remote servers. This is also fits well in Qualys cloud concept.

As I wrote earlier in “Qualys Vulnerability Management GUI and API“, Qualys working hard to make their web interface easier for beginners. When you go to CA (Cloud Agents) tab, the first thing you see is a user-friendly interface for quick start.

Cloud Agents Welcome

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Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner

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Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner. This will be a practical confirmation of my thesis from “Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side“: the scanner for one operating system is easy to make. I also want to demonstrate that data collection and data analysis for Vulnerability Assessment may be successfully performed separately. There is no need to take the data directly from the vulnerable hosts, when it is already stored somewhere else, for example in IT monitoring systems.

Assessment without vulnerability scanner

The opacity of data collection and the need to have a privileged account on the remote host, traditionally causes conflicts between IS and IT departments and complicates implementation of VM process.

So, to detect vulnerabilities on our Linux host we need to know what version of the packages contain vulnerabilities, which versions of packages are installed on our hosts, and learn how to compare versions.

How do I know which versions of packages are vulnerable?

Vulnerable versions of packages are listed in official security bulletins:
RHEL – https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016:0304
CentOS – https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2015-April/021064.html
Debian – http://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3197
Ubuntu – http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2537-1/

CESA bulletin example

Of course, you will need to parse them first. Or you can just download the same content already parsed and presented in JSON format with Vulners.
download CESA bulletins from Vulners
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Vulners – Google for hacker. How the best vulnerability search engine works and how to use it

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Vulners – Google for hacker. How the best vulnerability search engine works and how to use it. Original article was published in Xakep Magazine #06/2016 (in Russian)

vulners.com logo

The common task. Уou need to find all information about some vulnerability: how critical the bug is, whether there is a public exploit, which vendors already released patches, which vulnerability scanner can detect this bug in the system. Previously, you had to search it all manually in dozens of sources (CVEDetails, SecurityFocus, Rapid7 DB, Exploit-DB, CVEs from MITRE / NIST, vendor newsletters, etc.) and analyze the collected data. Today, this routine can be (and should be!) automated with specialized services. One of these services – Vulners.com, the coolest search engine for bugs. And what is the most important – it’s free and has an open API. Let’s see how it can be useful for us.

What is it?

Vulners is a very large constantly updating database of Information Security content. This site lets you search for vulnerabilities, exploits, patches, bug bounty programs the same way a web search engine lets you search for websites. Vulners aggregates and presents in convenient form seven major types of data:

  • Popular vulnerability databases, containing general descriptions of vulnerabilities and links. For example, well-known NVD CVEs of MITRE US agency and NIST Institute. In addition to this, Vulners supports vulnerability descriptions from various research centers and response teams: Vulnerability Lab, XSSed, CERT, ICS, Zero Day Initiative, Positive Technologies, ERPScan.
  • Vendor’s security bulletins. This bug-reports are published by software vendors and contain information about vulnerabilities in their own products. At current moment Vulners supports various Linux distributions (Red Hat, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE), FreeBSD, network devices (F5 Networks, Cisco, Huawei, Palo Alto Networks), popular and critical software (OpenSSL, Samba, nginx, Mozilla, Opera), including CMS (WordPress, Drupal).
  • Exploits from Exploit-DB, Metasploit and 0day.today. Exploits are parsed and stored in full-text form and you can read the sources in a convenient text editor.
  • Nessus plugins for vulnerability detection. It makes easy to find out whether a particular vulnerability can be detected using this popular network scanner. Why is it important? Read in my article “When a free scanning service detects vulnerabilities better“.
  • Bug disclousers for bug bounty programs. At current moment Vulners supports HackerOne and Open Bug Bounty.
  • Potential vulnerabilities of mobile applications and CMS. It is possible in cooperation with the static application security testing (SAST) vendors Hackapp and InfoWatch APPERCUT.
  • Posts from hacking resources. Vulners collects Threatpost and rdot.org publications, which often cover vulnerability related topics.

All this information is handled, cataloged, structured and is always available for the search.

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