Tag Archives: Kaspersky

Crypto AG scandal

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Crypto AG scandal. The article in The Washington Post is really huge, but even a brief glance is enough to see how absolutely amazing this Crypto scandal is. A great example of chutzpah. ?

“Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security. It was jointly owned by the American CIA and West German intelligence agency BND from 1970 until about 2008. … The company was a long-established manufacturer of [backdoored] encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices.”

“You think you do good work and you make something secure,” said Juerg Spoerndli, an electrical engineer who spent 16 years at Crypto. “And then you realize that you cheated these clients.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now the causes of hysteria around Kaspersky and Huawei become more clear. It is natural to suspect others in the things you practiced yourself.

A completely different company, with a different strategy

And note the disclaimer on the Crypto’s website. A completely different company, with a different strategy. ☝️? Okaaay…

Kaspersky Security Center 11 API: getting information about hosts and installed products

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Kaspersky Security Center 11 API: getting information about hosts and installed products. I spent a lot of time last week working with the new API of Kaspersky Security Center 11. KSC is the administration console for Kaspersky Endpoint Protection products. And it has some pretty interesting features besides the antivirus/antimalware, for example, vulnerability and patch management. So, the possible integrations with other security systems might be quite useful.

Kaspersky SC 11 openAPI

A fully functional API was firstly presented in this latest version of KSC. It’s is documented pretty well, but in some strange way. In fact, the documentation is one huge .chm file that lists the classes, methods of these classes and data structures with brief descriptions. It’s not a cookbook that gives a solution for the problem. In fact, you will need to guess which methods of which classes should be used to solve your particular task.

For the first task, I decided to export the versions of Kaspersky products installed on the hosts. It is useful to control the endpoint protection process: whether all the necessary agents and products were installed on the hosts or not (and why not).

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Asset Inventory for Internal Network: problems with Active Scanning and advantages of Splunk

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Asset Inventory for Internal Network: problems with Active Scanning and advantages of Splunk. In the previous post, I was writing about Asset Inventory and Vulnerability Scanning on the Network Perimeter. Now it’s time to write about the Internal Network.

Typical IT-infrastructure of a large organization

I see a typical IT-infrastructure of a large organization as monstrous favela, like Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. At the beginning it was probably wisely designed, but for years it  was highly effected by spontaneous development processes in various projects as well as multiple acquisitions. And now very few people in the organization really understand how it all works and who owns each peace.

There is a common belief that we can use Active Network Scanning for Asset Inventory in the organization. Currently, I’m not a big fan of this approach, and I will try to explain here the disadvantages of this method and mention some alternatives.

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ZeroNights 2017: back to the cyber 80s

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ZeroNights 2017: back to the cyber 80s. Last Friday, 17th of November, I attended the ZeroNights 2017 conference in Moscow. And it was pretty awesome. Thanks to the organizers! Here I would like to share some of my impressions.

my photo ZeroNights 2017

First of all, I want to say that two main Moscow events for information security practitioners, PHDays and ZeroNights, provide an excellent opportunity to meet all of the colleagues at once and to synchronize current views on important information security issues, including, of course, Vulnerability Management, the most relevant for me. My opinion is that this year’s behind-the-scene conversations were especially good. And this is the most valuable characteristic for the event.

Every ZeroNights event has it’s own style. This time it was some geeky cyber retro from 1980s, like in popular cult movie Kung Fury. The place was also changed from familiar Cosmos Hotel  to ZIL Culture Centre. It is the largest Palace of Culture from the Soviet Moscow times. The combination of US 80s cultural artifacts, RETROWAVE music with Soviet-style interiors (including, for example, statue of Lenin) made a pretty weird combination, but I liked it =)

I was unintentionally taking photos using some strange mode in camera and recorded a very short video fragment (3-5 seconds) for each photo. I decided to combine this fragments in a small video. This does not make much sense, but, perhaps, someone will find this “time-lapse” interesting 😉

Among the great presentations and workshops, there were also a small exhibition. This year there was two Vulnerability Management vendors: Beyond Security and Qualys.

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