Tag Archives: Palo Alto

Last Week’s Security news: Cisco ASA, BIG-IQ, vSphere, Solaris, Dlink, iPhone %s, DarkRadiation, Google schema, John McAfee

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Last Week’s Security news: Cisco ASA, BIG-IQ, vSphere, Solaris, Dlink, iPhone %s, DarkRadiation, Google schema, John McAfee. Hello, today I want to experiment with a new format. I will be reading last week’s news from my @avleonovnews channel, which I found the most interesting. I do this mostly for myself, but if you like it too, then that would be great. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and my Telegram @avleonovcom.

Let’s start with some new public exploits.

  1. Researchers at Positive Technologies have dropped a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit on Twitter for a known cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) CVE-2020-3580. This flaw was patched in October. There are reports of researchers pursuing bug bounties using this exploit. Maybe you should do this too. Well, or at least ask your IT administrators if they have updated the ASA.
  2. F5 BIG-IQ VE Post-auth Remote Root RCE. BIG-IQ provides a single point of management for all your BIG-IP devices — whether they are on premises or in a public or private cloud. It was possible to execute commands with root privileges as an authenticated privileged user via command injection in easy-setup-test-connection. A good reason to check if you have this in the infrastructure. But of course the fact that this is Post-auth makes it less interesting.
  3. VMware vCenter 6.5 / 6.7 / 7.0 Remote Code Execution. From the description of the vulnerability that was published in February 2021. “The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a remote code execution vulnerability in a vCenter Server plugin. A malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts vCenter Server.” Therefore, if your IT colleagues have not patched vCenter since February, you can try to demonstrate how this vulnerability is exploited in practice.
  4. Solaris SunSSH 11.0 Remote Root. “CVE-2020-14871 is a critical pre-authentication (via SSH) stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) in Oracle Solaris. PAM is a dynamic authentication component that was integrated into Solaris back in 1997 as part of Solaris 2.6”. If you are still using Solaris in your infrastructure, this is a great opportunity to try this exploit.
  5. Dlink DSL2750U – ‘Reboot’ Command Injection. There, in the exploit code, there is a link to the full study that shows how the researcher, Mohammed Hadi, gains admin access to the router. This is interesting considering that this router model is quite popular and you can still buy such a router.
  6. It’s 2021 and a printf format string in a wireless network’s name can break iPhone Wi-Fi. On Friday, Carl Schou, a security researcher in Denmark, reported that his iPhone lost its Wi-Fi capability after attempting to connect to a Wi-Fi network named “%p%s%s%s%s%n”. Fortunately, the damage appears not to be permanent. Apple iOS devices that lose Wi-Fi capability after being bitten by this bug can be restored via the General -> Reset -> Reset Network Settings menu option, which reverts network settings to their factory default. Not a very interesting vulnerability in terms of practical exploitation, but fun. Don’t connect to unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks.

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Divination with Vulnerability Database

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Divination with Vulnerability Database. 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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Retrieving Palo Alto NGFW security events via API

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Retrieving Palo Alto NGFW security events via API. It may seem like NGFW topic is not really related to vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management. In fact, correlation of security events in traffic with vulnerability scan data sometimes may give very interesting results. For example, if we have a Windows desktop host with critical vulnerabilities, it won’t be a big surprise to detect some botnet activity related to this host. Fixing of this hosts should be a high priority task. Moreover, Palo Alto NGFW now supports signatures for vulnerability detection, like Tenable PVS. It’s pretty logical: if you are already searching something in the network traffic, why not to look also for vulnerable software versions in the packet headers?

Palo Alto Monitor

I took this image from the official manual

At the “Monitoring” tab of Palo Alto NGFW GUI web-interface you can see a flow of security events, produced by Palo Alto security rules, standard or custom. With PA query language you may easily filter this events. It is also possible to produce reports. However, the standard reports Palo Alto are not very informative and only represent some statistics of attacks without any additional information. Much more interesting reports you can make using Palo Alto API.

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