Tag Archives: OpenVAS

VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners

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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.

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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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Is Vulnerability Management more about Vulnerabilities or Management?

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I’ve just read a nice article about Vulnerability Management in the Acribia blog (in Russian). An extract and my comments below.

In the most cases Vulnerability Management is not about Vulnerabilities, but about Management. Just filtering the most critical vulnerabilities is not enough.

Practical Cases:

  1. “Oh, yes, we know ourselves that that everything is bad!” – CVE-2013−4786 IPMI password hash disclosure on > 500 servers. Customer just accepted the risks, Acribia proposed an effective workaround (unbrutable user IDs and passwords). It’s often hard to figure out right remediation measures and implement them. Someone should do it!
  2. “We can download OpenVAS without your help!” – CVE-2018-0171 Cisco Smart Install RCE on 350 hosts. Vulnerability detection rules of several Vulnerability Scanners were not good enough to detect this vulnerability. Do not rely on scanners, know how they work and their limitations.
  3. “If the attackers wanted to hack us, they would have already done it!” – CVE-2017-0144 (MS17-010) Windows SMB RCE on domain controller and several other critical servers. Vulnerability was detected in infrastructure several times, the remediation was agreed with the management, but it was ignored by responsible IT guys. As a result, during the next successful WannaCry-like malware attack the servers, including the DC were destroyed. Vulnerability Management is about the willingness to patch anything, very quickly, as often as required. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

Vulnerability Management Product Comparisons (October 2019)

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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.

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Vulnerability Management at Tinkoff Fintech School

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In the last three weeks, I participated in Tinkoff Fintech School – educational program for university students. Together with my colleagues, we prepared a three-month practical Information Security course: 1 lecture per week with tests and home tasks.

Each lecture is given by a member of our security team, specialized in one of the following modules: Vulnerability Management, Application Security, Infrastructure Security, Network Security, Virtualization Security, Banking Systems Security, Blue & Red-teaming, etc.

Vulnerability Management at Tinkoff Fintech School

The course is still ongoing, but my Vulnerability Management module is over. Therefore, I want to share my impressions and some statistics.

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Vulnerability Databases: Classification and Registry

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What publicly available Vulnerability Databases do we have? Well, I can only say that there are a lot of them and they are pretty different. Here I make an attempt to classify them.

It’s quite an ungrateful task. No matter how hard you try, the final result will be rather inaccurate and incomplete. I am sure someone will be complaining. But this is how I see it. 😉 If you want to add or change something feel free to make a comment bellow or email me@avleonov.com.

The main classifier, which I came up with:

  • There are individual vulnerability databases in which one identifier means one vulnerability. They try to cover all existing vulnerabilities.
  • And others are security bulletins. They cover vulnerabilities in a particular product or products. And they usually based on on patches. One patch may cover multiple vulnerabilities.

I made this diagram with some Vulnerability Databases. Note that I wanted to stay focused, so there are no exploit DBs, CERTs, lists of vulnerabilities detected by some researchers (CISCO Talos, PT Research, etc.), Media and Bug Bounty sites.

Vulnerability Databases classification

For these databases the descriptions of vulnerabilities are publicly available on the site (in html interface or downloadable data feed), or exist in a form of paid Vulnerability Intelligence service (for example, Flexera).

On one side there are databases of individual vulnerabilities, the most important is National Vulnerability Database. There are also Chinese, Japanese bases that can be derived from NVD or not.

On the other side we have security bulletins, for example RedHat Security Advisories.

And in the middle we have a Vulnerability Databases, for which it is not critical whether they have duplicated vulnerability IDs or not.

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CISO Forum and the problems of Vulnerability Databases

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Last Tuesday, April 24,  I was at “CISO FORUM 2020: glance to the future“. I presented there my report “Vulnerability Databases: sifting thousands tons of verbal ore”. In this post, I’ll briefly talk about this report and about the event itself.

CISO Forum 2020

My speech was the last in the program. At the same time, in a parallel stream, there was another interesting presentation by the most famous Russian information security blogger. Thus, there was a real danger of speaking in an empty room. 🙂 But everything went well. There were about 30 spectators and we had an active QA session afterwards.

As I wrote earlier, I started preparing my CyberCentral presentation several months before the event. I did not want to tell the same story again at CISO Forum and PHDays. So I prepared 2 different presentations. At CyberCentral, I was talking about Vulnerability Scanners. And at CISO Forum I was talking mainly about Vulnerable Databases. Of course, I reused some materials, but the accents were different.

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