Tag Archives: Positive Technologies

MaxPatrol VM: An Ambitious Vision for Vulnerability Management Transformation

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MaxPatrol VM: An Ambitious Vision for Vulnerability Management Transformation. In this episode, I would like to share my thoughts about the new Vulnerability Management product by Positive Technologies – MaxPatrol VM. It was presented on November 16th, at the Standoff365 online conference (full video in Russian). The presentation and concept of the product were very good. I really liked them. However, as it always happens on vendor’s events, some critical topics were not covered. So I also want to highlight them. I will try to be as objective as possible. Although it is difficult for me, since I have worked in the company for 6 years, and many of my good friends work there.

MaxPatrol VM

Positive Technologies is best known in the Russian Vulnerability Management market. The volume of the Russian VM market in 2019 is $40-46 million. The volume of the world market, according to IDC, is $1.2 billion. So the Russian market is ~3% of the world market. And 78% of it is occupied by Positive Technologies products: Maxpatrol 8 and XSpider. Disclaimer: all numbers are from the Maxpatrol VM presentation and I haven’t done fact checking. But in this case, the numbers are not so important.

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ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2018

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ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2018. Last Thursday, September 20th, I spoke at ISACA Moscow “Vulnerability Management” Meetup held at Polytechnic University. The only event in Moscow devoted solely to Vulnerability Management. So I just had to take part in it. 🙂

ISACA VM 2018 Alexander Leonov

The target audience of the event – people who implement the vulnerability management process in organizations and the employees of Vulnerability Management vendors. I noticed groups of people from Altex-Soft (Altx-Soft), Positive Technologies and Vulners.

It was very interesting to see such concentration of Vulnerability and Compliance Management specialists in one place. Questions from the audience were relevant and often concerned the weaknesses of competitors. 😉 Here I will make a brief overview of the reports. You can also read here about previous year event at “ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2017“.

Talking about the audience, there were fewer people than last year, but still a lot:

ISACA VM 2018 auditorium small

The event was recorded. I will add video here as soon as it’s ready.

upd. Video in Russian. My presentation starts at 1:35:56

The event was conducted entirely in Russian, including all the slides. So, maybe I will make English subtitles and voiceover, at least for my part.

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A few words about Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing” 2018

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A few words about Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing” 2018. February and March are the hot months for marketing reports. I already wrote about IDC and Forrester reports about Vulnerability Management-related markets. And this Monday, March 19, Gartner released new “Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing”. You can buy it on the official website for $ 1,995.00 USD or download it for free from the vendor’s sites. For example, Synopsys or Positive Technologies. Thank you, dear vendors, for this opportunity!

I’m not an expert in Application Security. I am more in Device Vulnerability Assessment (IDC term) or Vulnerability Management. However, these field are related. And well-known Vulnerability Management vendors often have products or functionality for Web Application scanning and Source Code analysis as well. Just see Qualys, Rapid7 and Positive Technologies at the picture!

Gartner AST MQ 2018

I have already mentioned in previous posts that grouping products in marketing niches is rather mysterious process for me. For example, Gartner AST niche is for SAST, DAST and IAST products:

  • SAST is for source code or binary analysis
  • DAST is basically a black box scanning of deployed applications. it can be also called WAS (Web Application Scanning)
  • IAST is a kind of analysis that requires agent in the test runtime environment. Imho, this thing is still a pretty exotic.

As you can see, these are very different areas. But, the market is the same – AST.

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SOC Forum 2017: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Massive Malware Attacks

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SOC Forum 2017: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Massive Malware Attacks. Today I spoke at SOC Forum 2017 in Moscow. It was a great large-scale event about Security Operation Centers. 2,700 people registered. Lots of people in suits 😉 . And lots of my good fellows.

SOC Forum 2017 Alexander Leonov

The event was held in Radisson Royal Congress Park. There were three large halls for presentations and a huge space for exhibition/networking.

I would like to mention а stand of Positive Technologies. They have shown today their new PT Security Intelligence Portal with dashboards for executives and joint service with Solar Security for providing GosSOPKA functionality. Some stands were dedicated to Russian government Information Security initiatives: GosSOPKA, BDU FSTEC vulnerability database and FinCERT of the Central Bank of Russia.

During my presentation, I was talking how massive malware (ransomware) attacks can be useful for an organization. Quite a provocative topic, right? 😉 I meant it in the sense that all the hype around malware attack can help Information Security team to do the the following things:

  • Establish useful policies, like mandatory Windows host reboot after patch installation
  • Ban some convenient, but dangerous functionality, like smb file sharing between workstations
  • Implement useful processes, like system hardening (e.g. against mimikatz) or continuous processing of CERT (FinCERT) bulletins

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What’s inside Vulners.com database and when were security objects updated last time

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What’s inside Vulners.com database and when were security objects updated last time. As I already wrote earlier, the main advantage of Vulners.com, in my opinion, is openness. An open system allows you to look under the hood, make sure that everything works fine and ask developers uncomfortable questions why there were no updates for a long time for some types of security objects.

You can do this by using the https://vulners.com/api/v3/search/stats/ request, that I already mentioned in “Downloading entire Vulners.com database in 5 minutes”

First of all, let’s look at the security objects. This will give us an understanding of Vulners.com basis.

Vulners objects

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What’s new in Gartner WAF Magic Quadrant 2017?

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What’s new in Gartner WAF Magic Quadrant 2017? To tell the truth, I was not much interested in Web Application Firewall market since the time when I was doing competitive analysis in Positive Technologies. And a few days ago Gartner published a fresh WAF research with interesting Magic Quadrants. I decided to figure out what’s new there.

Here you can download full Gartner WAF MQ 2017 report for free. Thanks to Positive Technologies for such an opportunity!

First of all, let’s look at the illustrations. I took the Magic Quadrant from this year’s report:

Gartner Magic Quadrant WAF 2017

And for comparison from 2014 and 2015 reports:

Gartner Magic Quadrant WAF 2014 and 2015.

The first thing that caught my eye was Akamai in the leaders! And apparently this will be the main message.

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Petya the Great and why *they* don’t patch vulnerabilities

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Petya the Great and why *they* don’t patch vulnerabilities. I really like this. Just imagine. Quiet, routine, everyday Vulnerability Management process in organizations: scanning-patching, scanning-patching, scanning-patching… And then. Suddenly! PEEETYYA!!!

And at very same moment everything changes. People from different companies start to communicate with each other actively, reverse this new malware, share the data, write and share tools for detection and recovery. Security professional is a friend, a brother and a source of useful information for security professional. Real movement! Real community! =)

Petya ransomware

For example, my friends from Vulners.com created pretty popular gist about Petya (petrWrap, notPetya, GoldenEye) and updated in real time for several hours.

Vulners Petya gist

My former colleagues from Positive Technologies released detailed technical review of this ransomware (in Russian) few hours since the outbreak started, at 01:00 am . They also found a local kill switch, and probably were the first one. Simultaneously with Amit Serper from Cybereason.

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