Tag Archives: Maxpatrol

PHDays 11: towards the Independence Era

Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about the Positive Hack Days 11 conference, which took place on May 18 and 19 in Moscow. As usual, I want to express my personal opinion about this event.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239091

As I did last year, I want to start talking about this conference with a few words about the sanctions. US sanctions against Positive Technologies, the organizers of Positive Hack Days, were introduced a year ago. At that time it seemed very serious and extraordinary. But today, when our country has become the most sanctioned country in the world, those sanctions against Positive Technologies seem very ordinary and unimportant. In fact, it even seems to benefit the company somehow.

Continue reading

CISO Forum 2022: the first major Russian security conference in the New Reality

Hello everyone! After a two-year break, I took part in Moscow CISO Forum 2022 with a small talk “Malicious open source: the cost of using someone else’s code”.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239084

CISO Forum is the first major Russian conference since the beginning of The New Reality of Information Security (TNRoIS). My presentation was just on this topic. How malicious commits in open source projects change development and operations processes. I will make a separate video about this (upd. added Malicious Open Source: the cost of using someone else’s code). In this episode, I would like to tell you a little about the conference itself.

Continue reading

AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 1: Full video in Russian + Timecodes in English

Hello all! 2 weeks ago I participated in the best online event fully dedicated to Vulnerability Management in Russia. It was super fun and exciting. Thanks to all the colleagues and especially to Lev Paley for the great moderation! I have talked out completely. Everything I wanted and the way I wanted. It seems that not a single hot topic was missed.

AM LIve: Vulnerability Management conference

You can see the two hours video below. It is in Russian. And it’s pretty complicated to translate it all. I won’t event try. ? If you don’t understand Russian you can try auto-generated and auto-translated subtitles on YouTube, but the quality is far from ideal.

To give you the idea what we were talking about I added the timecodes in English.

Timecodes

Section 1. Vulnerability Management Process and Solutions

  • 5:18 Vulnerability Management Process Definition
  • 10:53 Vulnerability Management is the opposite of the admin’s saying “If it works – don’t touch it!” The main thing in the process is to somehow fix the vulnerabilities. (Leonov)
  • 12:30 Sometimes a basic vulnerability scanner and Jira is already a Vulnerability Management solution (Leonov)
  • 13:30 Difference between Vulnerability Management Solutions and Vulnerability Scanners
  • 17:09 Vulnerability Management and Vulnerability Scanners: in our restaurant we call rusks “croutons”, because a rusk cannot cost $8, but crouton can” (Leonov)
  • 23:00 Licensing schemes, delivery options and costs
  • 28:48 Module-based licensing and the situations when modules can be excluded from the subscription (Paley)
  • 30:24 Commercial Vulnerability Management solutions are expensive, especially when licensed per host (Leonov)
  • 31:00 Maxpatrol unlimited licenses (Bengin)
  • 34:08 Perimeter scanning: very critical, low reliability of banner-based detections, it’s better to assess hosts accessible from the Internet with internal authenticated scans. Criticality of the network as an element of scoring. (Leonov)
  • 36:50 The impact of Regulators on the Vulnerability Management Market, a free ScanOVAL tool
  • 39:10 What to do with vulnerabilities in local software products that are not supported by foreign VM vendors?
  • 44:00 When it’s enough to use a free scanner? Could there be a full-functional and free vulnerability scanner? In theory, yes, but it is not clear how the vendor will finance the maintenance of the knowledge base. In practice, we see how such stories collapse. You need to understand the limitations of free products (such as OpenVAS). Including the completeness of the scan results and the ease of building the VM process. (Leonov)
  • 47:19 Poll: what is used in your organization?
Continue reading

MaxPatrol VM: An Ambitious Vision for Vulnerability Management Transformation

In this episode, I would like to share my thoughts about the new Vulnerability Management product by Positive Technologies – MaxPatrol VM. It was presented on November 16th, at the Standoff365 online conference (full video in Russian). The presentation and concept of the product were very good. I really liked them. However, as it always happens on vendor’s events, some critical topics were not covered. So I also want to highlight them. I will try to be as objective as possible. Although it is difficult for me, since I have worked in the company for 6 years, and many of my good friends work there.

MaxPatrol VM

Positive Technologies is best known in the Russian Vulnerability Management market. The volume of the Russian VM market in 2019 is $40-46 million. The volume of the world market, according to IDC, is $1.2 billion. So the Russian market is ~3% of the world market. And 78% of it is occupied by Positive Technologies products: Maxpatrol 8 and XSpider. Disclaimer: all numbers are from the Maxpatrol VM presentation and I haven’t done fact checking. But in this case, the numbers are not so important.

Continue reading

Vulnerability Management Product Comparisons (October 2019)

Here I combined two posts [1.2] from my telegram channel about comparisons of Vulnerability Management products that were recently published in October 2019. One of them was more marketing, published by Forrester, the other was more technical and published by Principled Technologies.

Vulnerability Management Product Comparisons (October 2019)

I had some questions for both of them. It’s also great that the Forrester report made Qualys, Tenable and Rapid7 leaders and Principled Technologies reviewed the Knowledge Bases of the same three vendors.

Let’s start with Forrester.

Continue reading

Vulnerability Management for Network Perimeter

Network Perimeter is like a door to your organization. It is accessible to everyone and vulnerability exploitation does not require any human interactions, unlike, for example, phishing attacks. Potential attacker can automate most of his actions searching for an easy target. It’s important not to be such of target. 😉

Vulnerability Management for Network Perimeter

What does it mean to control the network perimeter? Well, practically this process consist of two main parts:

  • Assessing network hosts that are facing Internet using some Network Scanner (Nessus, OpenVAS, Qualys, MaxPatrol. F-Secure Radar, etc.)
  • Assessing application servers, e.g. Web Servers, on these hosts using some special tools, e.g. Web Application Scanners (Acunetix, Burp Suite, Qualys WAS, Tenable.io WAS, High-Tech Bridge ImmuniWeb, etc.)

Active scanning is a good method of perimeter assessment. Dynamics of the assets is relatively low, comparing with the Office Network. Perimeter hosts usually stays active all the time, including the time when you are going to scan scanning them. 😉

Most of the dangerous vulnerabilities can be detected without authorization: problems with encryption (OpenSSL Heartbleed, Poodle, etc.). RCE and DoS of web servers and frameworks (Apache Struts and Equifax case)

The best results can be achieved with scanners deployed outside of your network. Thus, you will see your Network Perimeter the same way a potential attacker sees it. But certainly, you will be in a better position:

  • You can ask your IT administrators to add your network and WAS scanners in white list, so they will not be banned.
  • You can check and correlate scan results of remote scanner with (authenticated?) scan results produced by the scanner deployed in your organization’s network and thus filtering false positives.

What about the targets for scanning? How should you get them?

Continue reading

MaxPatrol 8 installation process

Today I have a great opportunity to write about MaxPatrol 8. For me it is a very nostalgic experience. I worked for many year in Positive Technologies developing this product. And now I can write about it from the customer side.

MaxPatrol is still not very well known outside Russia and CIS, although this product available in English, and has even a Korean localization. So, why not to introduce this product to the readers of my blog? The other reason to write this post is a pretty common opinion, that MaxPatrol is very hard to install and use, and it is the main disadvantage of the product. In fact it is not true.

MaxPatrol 8 loading screen

MaxPatrol is not perfect like any other product. But it’s no more complex than any other enterprise level Vulnerability Management product. It’s my considered opinion after working with a number of other vulnerability and compliance assessment products. GUI may look unfamiliar from the first look, but you can quickly get used to it.

As for the functional capabilities, in some cases it is even difficult to compete with MaxPatrol. Here are the most interesting features:

  1. Advanced White Box assessment:
    • Extended OS inventory
    • Software license control
    • User control
    • Password recovery (hash brute-force)
    • Security checks for running services
  2. Advanced Compliance scanning capabilities
  3. Special assessment modules:
    • SAP ERP
    • SCADA
    • Core telecom networks
  4. Forensic mode – security incidents detection based on event logs analysis

The first blog post will be about MaxPatrol installation.

Continue reading