Tag Archives: ERPScan

PRYTEK meetup: Breach and Attack Simulation or Automated Pentest?

Last Tuesday, November 27, I spoke at “Business Asks for Cyber Attacks” meetup organized by PRYTEK investment platform. The event was held at the PRYTEK Moscow office in a beautiful XIX century building of a former textile manufactory.

PRYTEK Breach and Attack Simulation meetup

The goal of the meetup was to talk about new approaches in Vulnerability Analysis and how they can reduce the Information Security costs for organizations.

There were two presentations:

  • The first one was by Doron Sivan, Cronus CEO. He talked about his company’s product.
  • The second was mine. I criticized traditional vendors of vulnerability scanners, talked about things that work in companies, and things that don’t work, and what you should pay attention to when choosing a Vulnerability Management tool.

For the most part this was my report from the last ISACA VM Meetup. The only difference was in the conclusions, since the topic of this event and the audience were different.

I stressed that the Attack Simulation tools, like Cronus, that analyze vulnerabilities and network connectivity of hosts can be very helpful. They allow you to assess the criticality of each vulnerability better and help to justify the need in prompt patching for IT Team (see “Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation“).

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U.S. sanctions against Russian cybersecurity companies

I never thought that I will write here about state sanctions. Usually I try to ignore political topics. But now it’s necessary. Yesterday OFAC introduced sanctions against 5 Russian companies.

Treasury Sanctions Russian Federal Security Service Enablers

I would like to mention 3 of them:

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A few words about Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing” 2018

February and March are the hot months for marketing reports. I already wrote about IDC and Forrester reports about Vulnerability Management-related markets. And this Monday, March 19, Gartner released new “Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing”. You can buy it on the official website for $ 1,995.00 USD or download it for free from the vendor’s sites. For example, Synopsys or Positive Technologies. Thank you, dear vendors, for this opportunity!

I’m not an expert in Application Security. I am more in Device Vulnerability Assessment (IDC term) or Vulnerability Management. However, these field are related. And well-known Vulnerability Management vendors often have products or functionality for Web Application scanning and Source Code analysis as well. Just see Qualys, Rapid7 and Positive Technologies at the picture!

Gartner AST MQ 2018

I have already mentioned in previous posts that grouping products in marketing niches is rather mysterious process for me. For example, Gartner AST niche is for SAST, DAST and IAST products:

  • SAST is for source code or binary analysis
  • DAST is basically a black box scanning of deployed applications. it can be also called WAS (Web Application Scanning)
  • IAST is a kind of analysis that requires agent in the test runtime environment. Imho, this thing is still a pretty exotic.

As you can see, these are very different areas. But, the market is the same – AST.

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Gartner’s view on Vulnerability Management market

Not so long time ago Gartner’s report “Vulnerability Management an essential piece of the security puzzle” has become publicly available. Now you can read it for free by filling out a questionnaire on F-Secure website.

Gartner VM Market Guide

At the bottom of the document there is a reference to Gartner G00294756 from 05 December 2016. This document is quite fresh, especially for not very dynamic VM market ;-), and pretty expensive. Thanks for F-secure, we can read it now for free. If you are wondering why this anti-virus company is sponsoring Gartner VM reports: year ago they have bought Finnish VM vendor nScence, and I even did a small review of this product (F-Secure Radar Vulnerability Management solution, F-Secure Radar basic reporting, F-Secure Radar ticketing, F-Secure API for scanning).

Talking about the document, I would like, firstly, to thank Gartner. Do you know who writes most articles about VM? Of course, VM vendors. And we all understand that their main goal is to promote their own products. Reports of independent consulting firms, primarily IDC, Forrester and Gartner, allow us to get some balanced view from the side. It is very important.

Here I would like to comment some theses of the text.

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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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