Tag Archives: Greenbone

Greenbone introduced the Greenbone Basic vulnerability scanner for SMEs, the price of which is NOT tied to the number of IP addresses that can be scanned

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Greenbone introduced the Greenbone Basic vulnerability scanner for SMEs, the price of which is NOT tied to the number of IP addresses that can be scanned

Greenbone introduced the Greenbone Basic vulnerability scanner for SMEs, the price of which is NOT tied to the number of IP addresses that can be scanned. A license for 1 scanner will cost 2450 € per year. It will be delivered as a virtual machine image. There is a comparison table and a data sheet.

Greenbone Basic differences:

🔹 Compared to Greenbone Free, it WILL have a full database of plugins for vulnerability detection, compliance scanning, scan scheduler, alerts, LDAP/Radius authentication, HTTPS certificate management, NTP integration.

🔹 Compared to Greenbone Enterprise, there WILL NOT be the ability to hierarchically connect scanners (sensors). API support, vulnerability remediation tickets, technical support from Greenbone and further enterprise features.

In terms of features, it looks like a real alternative to Tenable’s Nessus Professional. Competition in the entry-level fixed-price VM segment is intensifying. 👍

На русском

OpenVAS Knowledge Base become smaller

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OpenVAS Knowledge Base become smaller. At 23 January Jan Oliver Wagner, leader of OpenVAS project and Greenbone CEO, sent an email with a subject “Attic Cleanup”. In this message, he mentioned, that some NASL plugins will be excluded from the public NVT / Greenbone Community Feed (GCF) soon.

On the one hand it seems logical. These old plugins are not often used, but can slow down the scanner. But in fact there will be less plugins in public NVT feed. And the the commercial Greenbone Security Feed (GSF) will not change. Not good. 😉

“However, we will keep those NVTs in the Greenbone Security Feed (GSF) for the reasons of policy and of service level agreement.”

I took the archives downloaded within a few months after the letter and analyzed which plugins were added and removed:

  • tar -xf community-nvt-feed-current.tar -C 230118/
  • tar -jxf community-nvt-feed-current-2.tar.bz2 –directory 150218/
  • tar -jxf community-nvt-feed-current-3.tar.bz2 –directory 230318/

OpenVAS Plugins Deleted from community feed

The overall amount of plugins changed from 57502 to current 53383.

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Scaner-VS: Vulnerability Management solution for Russian Military

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Scaner-VS: Vulnerability Management solution for Russian Military. Scaner-VS is a Vulnerability Assessment system developed by Moscow-based NPO Echelon. It’s pretty popular in Russian government organizations, especially in Russian Army, because it comply all government requirements, has all necessary certificates and is relatively cheap.

Scaner-VS webgui

As for requirements and certificates, NPO Echelon itself is an important certification authority, so they know how to do the things right. It’s not a secret product or something. You can request trial version freely at http://scaner-vs.ru/version-for-testing/. But note, that it is only available in Russian. I am also sorry, but screenshots in this post will be also in Russian. I will try to do my best to describe them properly.

When you fill the form on Echelon website, you will soon get a link to 3.3 gb .iso file by email. Run it in VirtualBox virtual machine (choose Debian 64 or Debian 32).

Here is a boot menu. Choose first default option.

Scaner-VS boot

Some seconds later you will see Linux desktop environment with Scaner-VS web-GUI opened in Firefox.

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Great OpenVAS news: delay in plugin feed will be dropped, new GVM-Tools for remote management released

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Great OpenVAS news: delay in plugin feed will be dropped, new GVM-Tools for remote management released. Jan Oliver Wagner, CEO of Greenbone and OpenVAS Community leader sent recently several messages to community email list with the great news.

First of all, Greenbone decided to drop two weeks delay in a free plugin feed, that was implemented in June 2017 and made some OpenVAS users pretty nervous.

I wrote about it in “GSM Community Edition and lagging OpenVAS Plugin Feed“. The good thing is that, it has increased interest in NASL scripting among OpenVAS users. I also made some steps in this way in “Adding third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS“. I don’t now why Greenbone finally decided to drop this delay, but I am very glad for this decision. Wise move!

The feed will stay delayed until September 4th, 2017. To demonstrate the current state I used some data from Vulners.com collections. Let’s see the nasl vulnerability detection plugins for CentOS in Nessus and OpenVAS. I know that Windows would be much more clear, but Microsoft released latest MS17-023 bulletin in March, so now there is no much difference there.

CentOS Nessus Openvas 2 week delay

As you can see, no OpenVAS plugins since 2017-08-16, literally two weeks. And I hope this will change very soon.

Don’t forget that NVT will be called now GCF (Greenbone Community Feed) and some advanced enterprise-level checks will be now released only in paid feed.

Another good news is the recent release of open source GVM-Tools for controlling OpenVAS remotelly. It will replace old console client openvas-cli (omp). Let’s try to download and install it on Debian host with installed OpenVAS (see “Installing OpenVAS 9 from the sources“).

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Adding third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS

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Adding third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS. If you want to develop nasl plugins for OpenVAS, you might be interested how to import them in scanner. So, I was also interested.

First of all, I decided to copy one of existing nasl scripts. I chose script that successfully detected vulnerability on a target host. Thus, in the case of importing error, I would know for sure that it’s not because of syntax errors in script, but, for example, because non-existing plugin signature.

I scanned target CentOS host, chose and copied script file, changed id of the script (oid) and script title, rebuilt database. Then I rescanned target host.

CESA edited

As you can see, new script is also in results. Pretty straightforward.

CESA edited description

Now, let’s review the actual commands.

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GSM Community Edition and lagging OpenVAS Plugin Feed

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GSM Community Edition and lagging OpenVAS Plugin Feed. As I already wrote in “Installing OpenVAS 9 from the sources“, since May 2017 OpenVAS 9 is available in a form of free virtual appliance. It is called GSM Community Edition (GCE) and is based on Greenbone commercial product GSM ONE.

What’s the difference between GSM ONE and free GCE? GSM Community Edition uses different Community Feed of NASL plugins, it can’t be updated automatically and does not have some management features. The most important, in my opinion, is that it does not support OpenVAS Management Protocol (OMP), API for managing scanners. Only HTTPS for WebGUI and SSH are available.

GSM start screen

Talking about different NASL plugin feeds, I need to mention recent message by Jan-Oliver Wagner in Openvas-announce list.

That seems like Greenbone is rather tired of developing OpenVAS by themselves and watching how other companies use theirs engine and feeds, positioning themselves as an “alternative to Greenbone’s product at a better price”. So, they decided:

  1. “OpenVAS NVT Feed” will be renamed to “Greenbone Community Feed”
  2. Public access to the “openvas-nvts” SVN repository will be forbidden, but the license of nasl plugins won’t be changed.
  3. Now Community Feed lags 14 days from commercial feed, but Greenbone would like to make an actual feed, but without some features for enterprise customers.

I really care about Greenbone and they, of course, do as they think is better for the company and OpenVAS community, but at the same time it reminds me situation with Tenable and Nessus. Maybe not so radical. But definitely in the same direction.

Feed delayed for 2 week can’t be used effectively for obvious reasons. If you see exploitation of critical vulnerability like WannaCry in the wild and will need to wait 2 weeks to check your infrastructure, it’s a nonsense! 🙂 That’s mean that you just can’t rely on OpenVAS anymore. And if you use it, you should think about migration on commercial solution, for example on Greenbone’s GSM, or think about getting actual plugin feed somewhere else.

The good thing, it might show customers once again that knowledge base of Vulnerability Management solution is important and stimulate other security content developers to make own nasl scripts and feeds.

But let’s go back to GSM Community Edition. Detailed description of installation process you can find on official site. I will just describe my own experience.

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

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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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