October 2023: back to Positive Technologies, Vulristics updates, Linux Patch Wednesday, Microsoft Patch Tuesday, PhysTech VM lecture. Hello everyone! October was an interesting and busy month for me. I started a new job, worked on my open source Vulristics project, and analyzed vulnerabilities using it. Especially Linux vulnerabilities as part of my new Linux Patch Wednesday project. And, of course, analyzed Microsoft Patch Tuesday as well. In addition, at the end of October I was a guest lecturer at MIPT/PhysTech university. But first thing first.
Microsoft Patch Tuesday December 2022: SPNEGO RCE, Mark of the Web Bypass, Edge Memory Corruptions. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for December 2022, including vulnerabilities that were added between November and December Patch Tuesdays. As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities.
But let’s start with an older vulnerability. This will be another example why vulnerability prioritization is a tricky thing and you should patch everything. In the September Microsoft Patch Tuesday there was a vulnerability Information Disclosure – SPNEGO Extended Negotiation (NEGOEX) Security Mechanism (CVE-2022-37958), which was completely unnoticed by everyone. Not a single VM vendor paid attention to it in their reviews. I didn’t pay attention either.
Vulnerability Management news and publications #1. Hello everyone! In this episode, I will try to revive Security News with a focus on Vulnerability Management.
On the one hand, creating such reviews requires free time, which could be spent more wisely, for example, on open source projects or original research. On the other hand, there are arguments in favor of news reviews. Keeping track of the news is part of our job as vulnerability and security specialists. And preferably not only headlines.
I usually follow the news using my automated telegram channel @avleonovnews. And it looks like this: I see something interesting in the channel, I copy it to Saved Messages so that I can read it later. Do I read it later? Well, usually not. Therefore, the creation of news reviews motivates to read and clear Saved Messages. Just like doing Microsoft Patch Tuesday reviews motivates me to watch what’s going on there. In general, it seems it makes sense to make a new attempt. Share in the comments what you think about it. Well, if you want to participate in the selection of news, I will be glad too.
I took 10 news items from Saved Messages and divided them into 5 categories:
VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners. Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf22 Vulnerability Management conference. I want to talk about the blind spots in the knowledge bases of Vulnerability Scanners and Vulnerability Management products.
This report was presented in Russian at Tenable Security Day 2022. The video is here.
Potential customers rarely worry about the completeness of the Knowledge Base when choosing a Vulnerability Scanner. They usually trust the VM vendors’ claims of the “largest vulnerability base” and the total number of detection plugins. But in fact the completeness is very important. All high-level vulnerability prioritization features are meaningless unless the vulnerability has been reliably detected. In this presentation, I will show the examples of blindspots in the knowledge bases of vulnerability management products, try to describe the causes and what we (as customers and the community) can do about it.
Vulristics Command Line Interface, improved Product & Vuln. Type Detections and Microsoft Patch Tuesday November 2021. Hello everyone! In this episode I want to highlight the latest changes in my Vulristics project. For those who don’t know, this is a utility for prioritizing CVE vulnerabilities based on data from various sources.. Currently Microsoft, NVD, Vulners, AttackerKB.
Command Line Interface
I started working on the CLI for Vulristics. Of course, it is not normal to edit scripts every time to release a report.
PHDays 10: U.S. Sanctions, My Talk on Vulristics, Other Great Talks Related to VM. 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.
Microsoft Patch Tuesday June 2020: The Bleeding Ghost of SMB. This time, Microsoft addressed 129 vulnerabilities: 11 critical and 118 important. In fact, in the file that I exported from the Microsoft website, I saw 2 more CVEs (CVE-2020-1221, CVE-2020-1328) related to Microsoft Dynamics 365 (on-premises). But there is no information on them on the Microsoft website, in the MITRE CVE database and NVD. Does this mean that these CVE ids were mentioned unintentionally and related to some critical issues? I don’t think so, but this is strange.
This time there were no vulnerabilities with detected exploitation, so let’s start with the group “Exploitation more likely” according to Microsoft.
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