Tag Archives: Kenna

My thoughts on the “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment”. What about the quality?

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The Gartner Vulnerability Management Reports are one of the few marketing reports that I try to read regularly. This started back in the days when I was working for a VM vendor doing competitive analysis. Gartner is one of the few organizations that think about Vulnerability Assessment and Vulnerability Management and clearly articulate where we are and where we are going.

I got a free reprint of “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment” from the Tenable website. Thanks a lot to them for that.

Let’s start with what I liked:

  1. It’s great that Gartner has made vulnerability prioritization technology (VPT) a separate class of solutions, that do not detect vulnerabilities themselves, but work with them. For example, Kenna or my Vulristics. And it could be additional functionality like Tenable VPR.
  2. I liked the focus on EDR as a promising VM replacement. Especially, Microsoft solutions (Defender for Endpoint or as was mentioned in the report Microsoft’s Threat & Vulnerability Management, TVM).
  3. It’s nice that various areas related to Vulnerability Management have been mentioned: Pentest, Bug Bounty, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS).
  4. An interesting diagram that shows that VA is primarily about “Assess” and “Asset Management”, VPT is primarily about “Prioritize” and “Workflow Management”, BAS is primarily about “Compensate” and “Security Controls”.

Now what I didn’t like. I have one pain point – the quality of the scanning. And here, on the one hand, something was said, but on the other, it was not enough and not as definite as I would like. Market Direction is the most interesting section of the document. And it was the most painful to read.

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What’s wrong with patch-based Vulnerability Management checks?

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My last post about Guinea Pigs and Vulnerability Management products may seem unconvincing without some examples. So, let’s review one. It’s a common problem that exists among nearly all VM vendors, I will demonstrate it on Tenable Nessus.

If you perform vulnerability scans, you most likely seen these pretty huge checks in your scan results like “KB4462917: Winsdows 10 Version 1607 and Windows Server 2016 October 2018 Security Update“. This particular Nessus plugin detects 23 CVEs at once.

What's wrong with patch-centric Vulnerability Management?

And, as you can see, it has formalized “Risk Information” data in the right column. There is only one CVSS score and vector, one CPE, one exploitability flag, one criticality level. Probably because of architectural limitations of the scanner. So, two very simple questions:

  • for which CVE (of these 23) is this formalized Risk Information block?
  • for which CVE (of these 23) exploit is available?

Ok, maybe they show CVSS for the most critical (by their logic) CVE. Maybe they somehow combine this parameter from data for different CVEs. But in most cases this will be inaccurate. Risk information data for every of these 23 vulnerabilities should be presented independently.

As you can see on the screenshot, one of these vulnerabilities is RCE the other is Information Disclosure. Vulnerability Management solution tells us that there is an exploit. Is this exploit for RCE or DoS? You should agree, that it can be crucial for vulnerability prioritization. And more than this, in the example there are 7 different RCEs in Internet Explorer, MSXML parser, Windows Hyper-V, etc. All this mean different attack scenarios. How is it possible to show it Vulnerability Scanner like one entity with one CVSS and exploitability flag? What can the user get from this? How to search in all this?

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My short review of “The Forrester Wave: Vulnerability Risk Management, Q1 2018”

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Last week, March 14, Forrester presented new report about Vulnerability Risk Management (VRM) market. You can purchase it on official site for $2495 USD or get a free reprint on Rapid7 site. Thanks, Rapid7! I’ve read it and what to share my impressions.

Forrester VRM report2018

I was most surprised by the leaders of the “wave”. Ok, Rapid7 and Qualys, but BeyondTrust and NopSec? That’s unusual. As well as seeing Tenable out of the leaders. 🙂

The second thing is the set of products. We can see there traditional Vulnerability Management/Scanners vendors, vendors that make offline analysis of configuration files and vendors who analyse imported raw vulnerability scan data. I’m other words, it’s barely comparable products and vendors.

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Masking Vulnerability Scan reports

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Continuing the series of posts about Kenna (“Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data“, “Connectors and REST API“) and similar services. Is it actually safe to send your vulnerability data to some external cloud service for analysis? Leakage of such information can potentially cause great damage to your organization, right?

Masking Vulnerability Scans

It’s once again a problem of trust to vendor. IMHO, in some cases it may make sense to hide the real hostnames and ip-addresses of the target hosts in scan reports. So, it would be clear for analysis vendor that some critical vulnerability exists somewhere, but it would not be clear where exactly.

To do this, each hostname/ip-address should be replaced to some values of similar type and should be replaced on the same value each time. So the algorithms of Kenna-like service could work with this masked reports. This mean that we need to create a replacement dictionary.

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Kenna Security: Connectors and REST API

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In the last post about Kenna Security cloud service I mentioned their main features for analyzing data from different vulnerability scanners. Now let’s see how to import Tenable Nessus scan results in Kenna. Here you can see the list of connectors for all supported products:

Kenna connectors

Three connectors for Nessus are available:

  • Nessus Importer retrieves existing scan results from your Nessus server.
  • Nessus Scanner can schedule scans on your Nessus server.
  • Nessus XML imports xml (.Nessus2) files.

First two connectors work with Nessus server directly. And they probably won’t work anymore with Nessus Professional 7, because of API removing (see “New Nessus 7 Professional and the end of cost-effective Vulnerability Management (as we knew it)“). If Nessus server is deployed on-premise you should use special Kenna Virtual Tunnel.

Last “Nessus XML” connector is the most flexible. No matter how you got your scan results, it will be possible to import them to Kenna. See how to get XML reports from from Nessus server in a post “Retrieving scan results through Nessus API“.  You can upload XML scan results using Kenna web GUI (not very efficient way, but for testing – why not?) or REST API.

To use Kenna REST API you will need an Application Token. Go to the the Settings menu -> Applications:

Kenna settings

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Kenna Security: Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data

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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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