Tag Archives: Kirill Ermakov

Divination with Vulnerability Database

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Divination with Vulnerability Database. Today I would like to write about a popular type of “security research” that really drives me crazy: when author takes public Vulnerability Base and, by analyzing it, makes different conclusions about software products or operating systems.

CVE Numbers their occult power and mystic virtues

The latest research of such type, was recently published in CNews – a popular Russian Internet portal about IT technologies. It is titled ““The brutal reality” of Information Security market: security software leads in the number of holes“.

The article is based on Flexera/Secunia whitepaper. The main idea is that various security software products are insecure, because of amount of vulnerability IDs related to this software existing in Flexera Vulnerability Database. In fact, the whole article is just a listing of such “unsafe” products and vendors (IBM Security, AlienVault USM and OSSIM, Palo Alto, McAfee, Juniper, etc.) and the expert commentary: cybercriminals may use vulnerabilities in security products and avoid blocking their IP-address; customers should focus on the security of their proprietary code first of all, and then include security products in the protection scheme.

What can I say about these opuses of this kind?

They provide “good” practices for software vendors:

  • Hide information about vulnerabilities in your products
  • Don’t release any security bulletins
  • Don’t request CVE-numbers from MITRE for known vulnerabilities in your products

And then analysts and journalists won’t write that your product is “a leader in the number of security holes”. Profit! 😉

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Vulners – Google for hacker. How the best vulnerability search engine works and how to use it

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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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PHDays VI: The Standoff

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PHDays VI: The Standoff. A week ago I was at PHDays (Positive Hack Days) 2016 conference. For those who don’t know, there are two main events for security practitioners in Russia: PHDays in May and ZeroNights in November. Day-Night. Like this play on words. =)

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So, it was my 6th PHDays. I visited them all. But on this one for a first time I was as an ordinary visitor and not from organizers side. To be honest, I have never participated in organizing of PHDays, and just seen the final result. So, nothing changed much for me. As usual, organization was at very high level. And it’s not just my opinion, but the opinion of many participants.

Sad things first. And they are likely sad only for me. You know my passion to vulnerability assessment/management systems and scanners. So, despite the fact that Positive Technologies are the organizers of this event and Maxpatrol is still their’s flagman product, it was hard to hear anything related to vulnerability assessment/risk assessment/threat intelligence on PHDays. Isn’t it strange? Could you imagine this at Qualys QSC or Tenable event? Nothing much about critical controls and IT compliance in general.

It’s clear that vulnerability assessment is not already in trends in Russia. All are crazy about SIEM and slightly less about Anti-APT and SCADA security. Sad, but true.

Anyway, I have seen many interesting presentations about honeypots, computer forensics, machine learning and security startups. I also visited a SIEM roundtable with representatives of Positive Technologies, First Russian SIEM (RuSIEM), ArcSight, IBM Qradar, Splunk, and Cisco Systems. More details under the cut.

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