Tag Archives: NVD

Vulners Subsriptions and Apache Struts RCE

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If you work in IT Security Department of any large software developing company, you were probably searching for Apache Struts in your environment on this week.

And it’s all because of CVE-2017-5638:

Apache Struts is a free, open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating elegant, modern Java web applications, which supports REST, AJAX, and JSON.
In a blog post published Monday, Cisco’s Threat intelligence firm Talos announced the team observed a number of active attacks against the zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) in Apache Struts

This is a good example, that shows the usefulness of the Vulners.com service.

Just open cvelist:CVE-2017-5638 query and you will see all the objects related to this issue. This request works even before this CVE number appear on NVD and Mitre databases!

Vulners Apache Struts2 RCE

Here are: description of the vulnerability from The Hacker News, manual on how to use this vulnerability to gain server access from myhack58, Nessus local windows and remote cgi detection plugins.

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Divination with Vulnerability Database

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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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Forever “reserved” CVEs

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In this post I would like to provide some links, that you can use to find out necessary information about vulnerability by its CVE ID. I also want to share my amazement, how the method of using the CVE identifiers is changing.

Reserved CVE

Traditionally, CVE was a global identifier that most of vulnerabilities had. Have you found malicious bug in some software? Send a brief description to MITRE and you will receive CVE id. Some time later NIST will analyze this CVE, will add CVSS vector and CPEs and will put a new item to the NVD database. MITRE and NVD CVE databases were really useful source of information.

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