Tag Archives: python

Parsing Nessus v2 XML reports with python

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Upd. This is an updated post from 2017. The original script worked pretty well for me until the most recent moment when I needed to get compliance data from Nessus scan reports, and it failed. So I researched how this information is stored in a file, changed my script a bit, and now I want to share it with you.

Previous post about Nessus v2 reports I was writing mainly about the format itself. Now let’s see how you can parse them with Python.

Please don’t work with XML documents the same way you process text files. I adore bash scripting and awk, but that’s an awful idea to use it for XML parsing. In Python you can do it much easier and the script will work much faster. I will use lxml library for this.

So, let’s assume that we have Nessus xml report. We could get it using Nessus API (upd. API is not officially supported in Nessus Professional since version 7) or SecurityCenter API. First of all, we need to read content of the file.

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Detectify Asset Inventory and Monitoring

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Continuing the topic about perimeter services. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t think that the external perimeter services should be considered as a fully functional replacement for custom Vulnerability Management processes. I would rather see their results as an additional feed showing the problems your current VM process has. Recently I tested the Detectify’s Asset Inventory (Monitoring) solution, which provides such feed by automatically detecting the issues with your second, third (and more) leveled domains and related web services.

Detectify Asset Inventory screenshot from the official blog

Let say your organization has several second level web domains, over9000 third (and more) level domains, and you even don’t know for what services they are used. This is a normal situation for a large organization. So, you simply add yourorganization.com to Detectify, activate Asset Monitoring, and Detectify automatically discovers third (and more) level domains and related technologies: web services, CMS, JavaScript frameworks and libraries. “It provides thousands of fingerprints and hundreds of tests for stateless vulnerabilities such as code repository exposure for SVN or Git.” This is called fingerprinting.

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Barapass console Password Manager

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I decided to publish my simple console Password Manager. I called it barapass (github). I’ve been using It for quite some time in Linux and in Windows (in WSL). Probably it will also work natively in Windows and MacOS with minimal fixes, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Barapass logo

Why do people use password managers?

Well, with password manager it’s possible to avoid remembering passwords and make them arbitrarily complex and long. And no one will be able to brute force them. Of course, you can simply store passwords in text files, but password managers are better than this because:

  • no one will see your password over your shoulder;
  • if an attacker gains access to the files on your host, it won’t possible to read your passwords from the encrypted file or storage (well, ideally);
  • it’s easier to search for objects in the password manager and copy values from it.

I wanted something as simple as editing a text file with the key-value content. And I wanted it to be stored in a secure manner, and security could be easily checked, “simple and stupid”.

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How to get the Organization Units (OU) and Hosts from Microsoft Active Directory using Python ldap3

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I recently figured out how to work with Microsoft Active Directory using Python 3. I wanted to get a hierarchy of Organizational Units (OUs) and all the network hosts associated with these OUs to search for possible anomalies. If you are not familiar with AD, here is a good thread about the difference between AD Group and OU.

It seems much easier to solve such tasks using PowerShell. But it will probably require a Windows server. So I leave this for the worst scenario. 🙂 There is also a PowerShell Core, which should support Linux, but I haven’t tried it yet. If you want to use Python, there is a choice from the native python ldap3 module and Python-ldap, which is a wrapper for the OpenLDAP client. I didn’t find any interesting high-level functions in Python-ldap and finally decided to use ldap3.

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Kaspersky Security Center 11 API: getting information about hosts and installed products

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I spent a lot of time last week working with the new API of Kaspersky Security Center 11. KSC is the administration console for Kaspersky Endpoint Protection products. And it has some pretty interesting features besides the antivirus/antimalware, for example, vulnerability and patch management. So, the possible integrations with other security systems might be quite useful.

Kaspersky SC 11 openAPI

A fully functional API was firstly presented in this latest version of KSC. It’s is documented pretty well, but in some strange way. In fact, the documentation is one huge .chm file that lists the classes, methods of these classes and data structures with brief descriptions. It’s not a cookbook that gives a solution for the problem. In fact, you will need to guess which methods of which classes should be used to solve your particular task.

For the first task, I decided to export the versions of Kaspersky products installed on the hosts. It is useful to control the endpoint protection process: whether all the necessary agents and products were installed on the hosts or not (and why not).

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How to make Email Bot service in Python

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First of all, why you may want to use such service? Despite the fact that currently there are so many different channels of communication (including various messaging apps), Email is still a default and universal way to do it.

  • Literally every enterprise service supports email notifications, even if it’s integration capabilities are rather limited. So, with Email Bot you can automatically process such notifications.
  • Email is good, simple, reliable and familiar way to communicate with humans. Send an email – get response. Everyone can do it. So, email bot can make basic routine operations, like organizing the external meetings, pretty much like a human secretary.
  • It’s easier to code Email bot than any other interface, and the code can be reused for other communication channels, for example messaging apps.
How to make Email Bot service in Python

I get email messages from IMAP server in python3 using easyimap module.

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Retrieving data from Splunk Dashboard Panels via API

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Fist of all, why might someone want to get data from the panels of a dashboard in Splunk? Why it might be useful? Well, if the script can process everything that human analyst sees on a Splunk dashboard, all the automation comes very natural. You just figure out what routine operations the analyst usually does using the dashboard and repeat his actions in the script as is. It may be the anomaly detection, remediation task creation, reaction on various events, whatever. It really opens endless possibilities without alerts, reports and all this stuff. I’m very excited about this. 🙂

Exporting data from Splunk dashboard

Let’s say we have a Splunk dashboard and want to get data from the table panel using a python script. The problem is that the content of the table that we see is not actually stored anywhere. In fact it is the results of some search query, from the XML representation of the dashboard, executed by Splunk web GUI. To get this data we should execute the same search request.

That’s why we should:

  1. Get XML code of the dashboard
  2. Get the search query for each panel
  3. Process searches based on other searches and get complete search query for each panel
  4. Launch the search request and get the results

First of all, we need to create a special account that will be used for getting data from Splunk. In Web GUI “Access controls -> Users”.

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