Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2022. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2022. I release it pretty late, because of the my previous big episode about the blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners. Please take a look if you haven’t seen it. Well, if you are even slightly interested in the world news, you can imagine that the end of February 2022 in Eastern Europe is not the best time to create new content on Vulnerability Management. Let’s hope that peace and tranquility will be restored soon. And also that geopolitical confrontation between the largest nuclear powers will de-escalate somehow.
But let’s get back to information security. While working on Microsoft Patch Tuesday report for February 2022, I made a lot of improvements to my open source project for vulnerability prioritization Vulristics. I want to start with them.
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.
Vulristics Command Line Interface, improved Product & Vuln. Type Detections and Microsoft Patch Tuesday November 2021. Hello everyone! In this episode I want to highlight the latest changes in my Vulristics project. For those who don’t know, this is a utility for prioritizing CVE vulnerabilities based on data from various sources.. Currently Microsoft, NVD, Vulners, AttackerKB.
Command Line Interface
I started working on the CLI for Vulristics. Of course, it is not normal to edit scripts every time to release a report.
Last Week’s Security news: Serious Sam in Metasploit, PetitPotam, Zimbra Hijack, Joint Advisory TOP30 CVEs. Hello everyone! Last Week’s Security News, July 26 – August 1.
Serious Sam in Metasploit
Last week I talked about the Serious Sam vulnerability (CVE-2021-36934), also known as HiveNightmare. The name HiveNightmare comes from the fact that Windows stores its registry data in a small number of proprietary database files called hives. Due to mismanagement of SAM and SYSTEM hives in Windows 10, it is possible for an unprivileged user to read those files and then, for example, extract the account password hashes. An exploit for this vulnerability is now available in Metasploit and it will be much easier for attackers to exploit this vulnerability. The issues is still under investigation by Microsoft and a patch is not currently available, only the list of vulnerable OS versions, however a workaround has been provided.
PetitPotam
At the beginning of last week, PetitPotam (Little Hippo) attack made a lot of noise. It could force remote Windows systems to reveal password hashes that could then be easily cracked.
“The PetitPotam bug is tied to the Windows operating system and the abuse of a remote access protocol called Encrypting File System Remote Protocol (MS-EFSRPC). The protocol is designed to allow Windows systems to access remote encrypted data stores, allowing for management of the data while enforcing access control policies. […] The PetitPotam PoC is a form of manipulator-in-the-middle (MitM) attack against Microsoft’s NTLM authentication system. Next, an attacker uses the file-sharing protocol Server Message Block (SMB) to request access to a remote system’s MS-EFSRPC interface. According to [security researcher Gilles Lionel], this forces the targeted computer to initiate an authentication procedure and share its authentication details via NTLM.
In response to the public availability of the PoC, Microsoft was quick to respond, outlining several mitigation options. For starters, Microsoft recommends disabling NTLM authentication on Windows domain controllers. It also suggests enabling the Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA) feature on AD CS services.”
But there won’t be any special fix. Microsoft: “PetitPotam is a classic NTLM Relay Attack, and such attacks have been previously documented by Microsoft along with numerous mitigation options to protect customers.”
My thoughts on the “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment”. What about the quality? 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.
Last Week’s Security news: PrintNightmare patches and Metasploit, Kaseya CVEs, Morgan Stanley Accellion FTA, Cisco BPA and WSA, Philips Vue PACS, CISA RVAs, Lazarus job offers. 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.
Vulristics HTML Report Update: Table for Products, Table for Vuln. Types and “Prevalence”. Hi guys! I was on vacation this week. So I had time to work on my Vulristics project. For those who don’t know, this is a framework for prioritizing known CVE vulnerabilities. I was mainly grooming the HTML report.
I added a logo at the top, set a max width for the report, added a timestamp when the report was created so you can now see how fresh it is. I have combined CVSS and Vulristics score statistics in two parallel columns.
But the main new feature is the tables of vulnerable products and types of vulnerabilities. The products are sorted by “prevalence”. You can review this list and ask yourself if this order is correct in your opinion or change the “prevalence” values for some products in the config dictionary. For software products with unknown “prevalence”, you will see the comment “Unclassified Product”.
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