Tag Archives: CISA

On November 13, NIST NVD finally admitted the obvious: they had failed to process the CVE analysis backlog before the end of the fiscal year (September 30)

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On November 13, NIST NVD finally admitted the obvious: they had failed to process the CVE analysis backlog before the end of the fiscal year (September 30)

On November 13, NIST NVD finally admitted the obvious: they had failed to process the CVE analysis backlog before the end of the fiscal year (September 30). This is actually visible in their own statistics. At the moment, there are 19860 identifiers in the backlog. This week, 1136 new CVEs were received, and they analyzed only 510. And this is not some abnormal week, this happens regularly. They can’t cope with analyzing new vulnerabilities, they don’t have time to deal with the backlog. The crisis continues.

At the same time, for some reason, they write in the message that they have a full team of analysts, and they are addressing all incoming CVEs as they are uploaded into NVD system. But why do their statistics show the opposite?

They write that they processed all the vulnerabilities from CISA KEV. And that’s good. But CISA KEV only added 162 CVEs in 2024. It’s great that NVD was able to process these identifiers, but the achievement is, to put it mildly, not impressive.

Why can’t NVD process this backlog?

They write that the problem is in the format of data from Authorized Data Providers (ADPs), apparently meaning CISA Vulnrichment. NVD is currently unable to effectively import and enhance data in this format. In order to be able to do this, they are developing some “new systems”.

Not only have they admitted their inability to analyze vulnerabilities on their own and their willingness to use the results of someone else’s analysis as is, they also cannot write parser-converters in any adequate time. 🐾 I have no words. 🤦‍♂️

And now there is news that US Senator Rand Paul, the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has promised to seriously reduce the powers of CISA or eliminate them completely. 😁 It’s all because of CISA’s work “to counter disinformation” before the US elections. So the only American information security regulator capable of doing anything useful in a reasonable amount of time could be destroyed. Great idea, comrades, keep it up. 👍

I expect nothing but further degradation.

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The Americans have released joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CISA, FBI, HHS, MS-ISAC) against the Black Basta ransomware

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The Americans have released joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CISA, FBI, HHS, MS-ISAC) against the Black Basta ransomware

The Americans have released joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CISA, FBI, HHS, MS-ISAC) against the Black Basta ransomware. It is alleged that as of May 2024, more than 500 organizations worldwide have been affected by Black Basta, including businesses and critical infrastructure in North America, Australia and Europe. 12 of 16 critical infrastructure sectors are affected.

The ransomware was first spotted in April 2022. Initial Access is obtained through phishing or exploitation of the February vulnerability AuthBypass in ConnectWise ScreenConnect (CVE-2024-1709).

Privilege Escalation and Lateral Movement Toolkit: Mimikatz and Vulnerability Exploitation ZeroLogon (CVE-2020-1472), NoPac (CVE-2021-42278, CVE-2021-42287), PrintNightmare (CVE-2021-34527). Patches have been available for years, but organizations have not installed them. 🤷‍♂️ Perhaps they hoped that the perimeter would never be breached. 😏

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Joint Advisory AA22-279A and Vulristics

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Joint Advisory AA22-279A and Vulristics. Hello everyone! This episode will be about the new hot twenty vulnerabilities from CISA, NSA and FBI, Joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA) AA22-279A, and how I analyzed these vulnerabilities using my open source project Vulristics.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239105

Americans can’t just release a list of “20 vulnerabilities most commonly exploited in attacks on American organizations.” They like to add geopolitics and point the finger at some country. Therefore, I leave the attack attribution mentioned in the advisory title without comment.

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Vulnerability Management news and publications #1

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Vulnerability Management news and publications #1. Hello everyone! In this episode, I will try to revive Security News with a focus on Vulnerability Management.

On the one hand, creating such reviews requires free time, which could be spent more wisely, for example, on open source projects or original research. On the other hand, there are arguments in favor of news reviews. Keeping track of the news is part of our job as vulnerability and security specialists. And preferably not only headlines.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239095

I usually follow the news using my automated telegram channel @avleonovnews. And it looks like this: I see something interesting in the channel, I copy it to Saved Messages so that I can read it later. Do I read it later? Well, usually not. Therefore, the creation of news reviews motivates to read and clear Saved Messages. Just like doing Microsoft Patch Tuesday reviews motivates me to watch what’s going on there. In general, it seems it makes sense to make a new attempt. Share in the comments what you think about it. Well, if you want to participate in the selection of news, I will be glad too.

I took 10 news items from Saved Messages and divided them into 5 categories:

  1. Active Vulnerabilities
  2. Data sources
  3. Analytics
  4. VM vendors write about Vulnerability Management
  5. de-Westernization of IT

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2022

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2022. Hello everyone! I am glad to greet you from the most sanctioned country in the world. Despite all the difficulties, we carry on. I even have some time to release new episodes. This time it will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2022.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239076

I do the analysis as usual with my open source tool Vulristics. You can still download it on github. I hope that github won’t block Russian repositories and accounts, but for now it looks possible. Most likely, I will just start hosting the sources of my projects on avleonov.com in this case. Or on another domain, if it gets even tougher. Stay tuned.

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VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners

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VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners. Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf22 Vulnerability Management conference. I want to talk about the blind spots in the knowledge bases of Vulnerability Scanners and Vulnerability Management products.

This report was presented in Russian at Tenable Security Day 2022. The video is here.

Potential customers rarely worry about the completeness of the Knowledge Base when choosing a Vulnerability Scanner. They usually trust the VM vendors’ claims of the “largest vulnerability base” and the total number of detection plugins. But in fact the completeness is very important. All high-level vulnerability prioritization features are meaningless unless the vulnerability has been reliably detected. In this presentation, I will show the examples of blindspots in the knowledge bases of vulnerability management products, try to describe the causes and what we (as customers and the community) can do about it.

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QSC21, VMDR Training and Exam

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QSC21, VMDR Training and Exam. Hello everyone! On the one hand, because of the pandemic, we have become more distant from each other. We work mostly remotely from home. Traveling to a conference in another country has become much more difficult than it used to be. Now it is not only expensive. It has become much more difficult to obtain visas, there are restrictions related to vaccines, tests, quarantines, etc. And sometimes the borders are simply closed and it is impossible to get there.

On the other hand, we have become paradoxically closer to each other. Conferences have become much more online-oriented. And the main event of Qualys, QSC 21 Las Vegas, is now available to everyone with no delays or restrictions. This year, I not only watched the show, but also took VMDR training, passed the exam and received a certificate. I want to talk about this in this episode.

Conference

I will only state the main idea. Of course the way I understood it. Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), btw not related to a security blogger Brian Krebs, started the conference by talking about attacks. There will only be more of them, and it will be more difficult to mitigate these attacks. Of course, if companies could be protected with prohibitive measures, that would be fine. But the problem is that in order for a company to be competitive, it must build the “permissive environment”. Especially in our COVID times.

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