Tag Archives: NSA

Is it possible to detect Zero Day vulnerabilities with Vulnerability Management solutions?

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Hello everyone! In my English-language telegram chat avleonovchat, the question was asked: “How to find zero day vulnerabilities with Qualys?” Apparently this question can be expanded. Not just with Qualys, but with any VM solution in general. And is it even possible? There was an interesting discussion.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239109

Image generated by Stable Diffusion 2.1: “calendar on the wall cyber security vulnerability zero day”

The question is not so straightforward. To answer it, we need to define what a Zero Day vulnerability is. If we look at wikipedia, then historically “0” is the number of days a vendor has to fix a vulnerability.

“Eventually the term was applied to the vulnerabilities that allowed this hacking, and to the number of days that the vendor has had to fix them.”

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Joint Advisory AA22-279A and Vulristics

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about the new hot twenty vulnerabilities from CISA, NSA and FBI, Joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA) AA22-279A, and how I analyzed these vulnerabilities using my open source project Vulristics.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239105

Americans can’t just release a list of “20 vulnerabilities most commonly exploited in attacks on American organizations.” They like to add geopolitics and point the finger at some country. Therefore, I leave the attack attribution mentioned in the advisory title without comment.

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PHDays 10: U.S. Sanctions, My Talk on Vulristics, Other Great Talks Related to VM

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Today I will talk about the Positive Hack Days conference, which took place on May 20 and May 21 in Moscow. I can say that this was and remains the main event for Information Security Practitioners in Russia.

First of all, I have to say a few words about the sanctions. The organizer of the event, Positive Technologies, is under the sanctions of the US Treasury Department since April 2021 among the “COMPANIES IN THE TECHNOLOGY SECTOR SUPPORTING RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES”. In a press release, the Treasury Department wrote that Positive Technologies hosts large-scale conventions that are used as recruiting events for russian special services. Well, I don’t know exactly what they mean. Maybe they mean PHDays or maybe not. But to say this about PHDays is like saying that any major international conference, Black Hat or RSA, is a recruiting event. This is ridiculous. In my humble opinion, these are some dirty political games. It is sad that reputable information security companies and security researchers are suffering from this.

Now let’s talk about my speech at PHDays 10. This year I had the opportunity to talk for an hour about my pet project – Vulristics. This project can help you prioritize known vulnerabilities. Anything that has a CVE id. There is a full video of my speech. I have uploaded this to my YouTube channel.

Russian version.

And a version that was dubbed into English.

So, if you’re interested, I recommend watching the full video. Here I will simply repeat the main points.

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The most magnificent thing about Vulnerabilities and who is behind the magic

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What I like the most about software vulnerabilities is how “vulnerability”, as a quality of a real object (and the computer program is real), literally appears from nothing.

The most magnificent thing about Vulnerabilities and who is behind the magic

Let’s say we have a fully updated server. We turn it off, lock it in a safe and forget about it for half a year. Six months later, we get it, turn it on. It is the same and works absolutely the same. But now it is also exposed to dozens of critical vulnerabilities that, with some (un)luck, can be exploited by any script kiddie. New important characteristic of the material object appeared from nowhere, isn’t this magnificent? ?

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WannaCry about Vulnerability Management

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Nearly all mainstream media wrote today about massive ransomware attacks around the world: 16 medical institutions in UK, strong rumours that huge companies in Russia, and even Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs suffered a damage.

At this moment Kaspersky recorded more than 45,000 attacks in 74 countries around the world, but mostly in Russia. During the attack WannaCry malware encrypts data with the extension “.WCRY” added to the filename – that’s why it is called this way.

WannaCry CryptoLocker

What I like in this WannaCry story, that it’s actually all about Vulnerability Management.

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