Tag Archives: F-Secure

My comments on Forrester’s “Vulnerability Management vendor landscape 2017”

A top consulting company, Forrester Research, recently published report “Vendor Landscape: Vulnerability Management, 2017“. You can read for free by filling a small form on Tenable web site.

Forrester Vendor Landscape: Vulnerability Management, 2017

What’s interesting in this document? First of all, Josh Zelonis and co-authors presented their version of VM products  evolution. It consists of this steps (I have reformulated them a bit for the copyright reasons) :

  1. Initial fear of automated vulnerability assessment tools
  2. Mid-1990s and first productized offerings
  3. Authenticated scanning dramatically improved accuracy of scans
  4. Application scanning (DAST)
  5. Security assessment of software containers and DevOps in general.

As you see, the last one is about containerization. And it is now presented only in Tenable.io/FlawCheck. 😉

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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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F-Secure API for scanning

This post will be about API of F-Secure Radar. API become a crucial feature when you have to scan a range of thousands hosts and you can’t just add it in one Vulnerability Scanning task. As I mentioned earlier in “F-Secure Radar Vulnerability Management solution” Vulnerability Scanning in Radar is for known active IPs only, for ranges – Discovery Scans. Basically, in F-Secure Radar there is always one vulnerability scan for one host. Unusual concept, but it have some advantages. And it’s quite convenient when you work with Radar via API.

So, my plan for this post is to get active IPs from discovery scan report, create vulnerability scans, run them and get reports. All using API.

To use API you need to get API key at “F-Secure Radar -> Settings -> My profile”.

F-Secure Radar API key

To check that API is working we may send a request:

GET /v1/Scans/Types HTTP/1.1
Host: api.radar.f-secure.com
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
UserName: radar_user@corporation.com
APIKey: JDOBH9MV24ZOENMS94QCO8QP

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F-Secure Radar ticketing

I personally don’t use ticketing systems integrated in VM solutions. I think it’s hard to explain IT guys why they should use yet another ticketing system for patching tasks only additionally to their main Jira or whatever they use (see “Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side“).

But I assume that for some companies this feature may be useful or even critical.

Anyway, it’s always nice to see how the vendor works with vulnerability data to get some ideas for own ticketing procedures (see “VM Remediation using external task tracking systems“).

In F-Secure Radar you can create tickets at “Vulnerabilities” tabs. Here is the a whole list of detected vulnerabilities (filtered by CVSS > 8 by default).

F-Secure Ticketing

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F-Secure Radar basic reporting

In previous post about Radar (“F-Secure Radar Vulnerability Management solution“) I was describing how to use it for authenticated and unauthenticated scanning both inside and outside of your network.

But what about the vulnerability reports?

To get vulnerability report you should open Reporting Tab. As you can see, Radar supports reports for single scan results and summary reports. I don’t actually a big fan of standard vulnerability summary reports, because in practice you will always need to change something in them, and it’s impossible in most cases.

F-Secure Radar reports

I have filtered only Linux OS scans using filter. You can also filter by friendly name (some id, that you can set manually), host name/ip , time of scanning, responsible person, severity level, scan group or even by scan tags.

Radar Filters

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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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