Tag Archives: Perl

November 2023 – January 2024: New Vulristics Features, 3 Months of Microsoft Patch Tuesdays and Linux Patch Wednesdays, Year 2023 in Review

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Hello everyone! It has been 3 months since the last episode. I spent most of this time improving my Vulristics project. So in this episode, let’s take a look at what’s been done.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239139

Also, let’s take a look at the Microsoft Patch Tuesdays vulnerabilities, Linux Patch Wednesdays vulnerabilities and some other interesting vulnerabilities that have been released or updated in the last 3 months. Finally, I’d like to end this episode with a reflection on how my 2023 went and what I’d like to do in 2024.

New Vulristics Features

Vulristics JSON input and output

In Vulristics you can now provide input data in JSON format and receive output in JSON format. Which opens up new opportunities for automation.

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Potential RCE in Nessus 7 and attacks on Vulnerability Scanners

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A few days ago I saw an interesting youtube video (UPD. 14.05.18 Not available anymore). It is demonstrating the exploitation of the RCE vulnerability in Tenable Nessus Professional 7.0.3. Currently we have very few information about this vulnerability: only youtube video, which is mentioned only on ExploitWareLabs.

Nessus 7.0.3 RCE

While there is no exploit in public access, it’s hard to say how it actually works. It’s also not clear what versions of Nessus are affected. 7.0.3 is the latest version currently. Because of API disabling in Nessus 7 many users are still on 6.11.3. It is not clear whether they are affected or not.

This even can be a fake video. Therefore, I specifically write “potential RCE”. I will update this post when more data is available.

UPD. 14.05.18 In the comments to my post anonymous account Destring Portal posted a comment with the second video of Nessus RCE exploitation and it seems, that it was made by the same author. In this video, the author runs a remote shell on the Nessus host and executes various commands. I will add review of this second video bellow.

Nessus RCE second video

UPD. 10.05.18 Renaud Deraison, Co-Founder and CTO of Tenable, commented on my post at Linkedin:

Our research team studied the video and we have several reasons to doubt its authenticity. We’ve conducted a thorough audit over the last 48 hours based the few details that are in the video and didn’t find anything. We reached out the researcher and instead of replying he removed the video*. We’ll communicate if indeed there is a risk.

In general, you are right though – the security of scanners is of paramount importance. This actually is a topic I’ve been extremely worried about ever since the early days of Nessus. We have a number of security mechanisms in place (interpreted language for the detection scripts, ciphered temporary files, very limited runtime environment) which really aim to limit the risk of being exploited but also to mitigate the risk should the scanner be compromised. I actually did a few talks in the past about scanning “rogue hosts” and we continue to treat all input as hostile.

Again, we’re continuing to investigate the matter and will let you know if we find anything.

* currently video is still available on the same address; it could be probably blocked for some time. (UPD. 14.05.18 Not available anymore)

In any case, it’s a good reason to talk about vulnerabilities of such kind, how they appear and how to protect Vulnerability Scanners from attackers.

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Qualys Vulnerability Management GUI and API

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It has been a long time since I wrote something about Qualys, but today I will write not just about their free product or service, like SSL Labs, but about the main Cloud Platform.

Qualys VM GUI and API

Qualys pioneered cloud Vulnerability Management. How the cloud VM works? In simple terms, there is a web portal https://qualysguard.qualys.com (or .eu for Europe). You can login there, specify a list of IP addresses you want to check and Qualys server(-s) will scan this hosts and show you a vulnerability report.

Qualys Login

Ok, it’s clear with perimeter, but what if some hosts are only accessible from your internal network? In this case, you need to purchase Qualys network appliance, which will communicate Qualys server (read more at “Using Qualys Virtual Appliance“). You create a scan task on Qualys web portal to scan hosts in your internal network, Qualys server gives an order to appliance to gather information about these hosts and to send it back to the server for analysis. Most of the security analysis is done “in the cloud” by remote Qualys servers. End-user manage VM service either through Qualys  web-portal GUI, or API.

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