Tag Archives: CVE

Kenna Security: Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data

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Kenna Security: Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data. I’ve been following Kenna Security (before 2015 Risk I/O) for a pretty long time. Mainly, because they do the things I do on a daily basis: analyse various vulnerability scan results and feeds, and prioritize detected vulnerabilities for further mitigation. The only difference is that my scripts and reports are highly specific for my employer’s infrastructure and needs. And guys from Kenna team make a standardized scalable cloud solution that should be suitable for everyone.

I think their niche is really great. They do not compete directly with Vulnerability Management vendors. They can be partners with any of them, bringing additional features to the customers. Perfect win-win combination. That’s why Kenna speakers regularly participate in joint webinars with VM vendors.

I couldn’t lose a great opportunity to see Kenna Security service in action. 😉

In this post I will try to make a very brief review of Kenna functionality and formulate pros and cons of the solution.

When you submit trial request at https://www.eu.kennasecurity.com/signup (or https://app.kennasecurity.com/signup if you are not in Europe) you will get a link to your company account:

https://corporation.eu.kennasecurity.com/

The login screen will look like this:

Kenna login

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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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Downloading and analyzing NVD CVE feed

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Downloading and analyzing NVD CVE feed. In previous post “New National Vulnerability Database visualizations and feeds” I mentioned JSON NVD feed.

NVD JSON feed parse python

Let’s see what data it contains, how to download and analyse it. First of all, we need to download all files with CVEs from NVD database and save them to some directory.

nvd feed json download

Unfortunately, there is no way to download all the content at once. Only one year archives. We need to get urls first. Url looks like this: https://static.nvd.nist.gov/feeds/json/cve/1.0/nvdcve-1.0-2017.json.zip. Then we will download them all.

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New National Vulnerability Database visualizations and feeds

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New National Vulnerability Database visualizations and feeds. Recently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) introduced a new version of National Vulnerability Database (NVD) website.

NIST NVD new site

I will not say that I liked this redesign:

new NVD website

IMHO, old website with US flag was much prettier and useful:

old NVD website

But the very fact that the site is developing, I really like very much. Let’s see what’s new there.

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Problems of Vulnerability Prioritization and Detection

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Problems of Vulnerability Prioritization and Detection. It’s the third part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show “Safe Environment” recorded 29.03.2017. In this part we talk about Vulnerability Prioritization and Detection:

  • Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)
  • Environmental factor
  • Manual and  automated vulnerability detection
  • Unauthenticated and authenticated  scanning
  • Why vulnerability scanners are so expensive and why the can’t detect everything

Scanner does not detect all vulnerabilities

Video with manually transcribed Russian/English subtitles:

Prioritization

– Here also the question how to prioritize vulnerabilities properly. Because if you have, as you said, two Linux servers and 20 workstations running Windows, then in principle, you may not need to do prioritization. But if you have fifteen hundred servers: some of them are on perimeter, some are in your DMZ, some are in the internal network. It is still necessary, probably, to understand correctly which vulnerabilities and where should be patched in in the first place.

Yes, this is absolutely true and it’s a very good question. How to prioritize?

Common Vulnerability Scoring System

A natural way. If we look at vulnerabilities with a CVE identifier, for them in the US National Vulnerability Database we can find CVSS Base Score. It is an assessment of vulnerability criticality level.

How is it calculated?

Some person fills the questionnaire: can it be remotely exploited – no, is there public exploit – no, etc.

CVSS framework

The result is a CVSS vector – this is a line in which you can see the main characteristics of this vulnerability and CVSS Base score is the score from 0 to 10 depending on criticality.

This is a natural way of prioritization. But sometimes this method does not give very good results.

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Downloading entire Vulners.com database in 5 minutes

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Downloading entire Vulners.com database in 5 minutes. Today I once again would like to talk about Vulners.com and why, in my opinion, it is the best vulnerability database that exist nowadays and a real game-changer.

The main thing is transparency. Using Vulners you not only can search for security content (see “Vulners – Google for hacker“), but download freely all available content from the database for your own offline analysis. And more than this, you can even see how Vulners actually works and evaluate how fresh and full the content is.

Vulners collections

Why you may need to download full security content database? For example, you may want to create something like vulnerability quadrants.

Vulnerability Quadrant

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Programmers are also people who also make mistakes

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Programmers are also people who also make mistakes. 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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