Tag Archives: Qualys ThreatPROTECT

QSC16: from Vulnerability Management to IT Visibility

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QSC16: from Vulnerability Management to IT Visibility. I want to share my impressions of QSC16 conference, where recently I had pleasure to attend. This yearly conference is held in Munich for ten years already. I was there before only one time, in 2012. It made a great impression and this year was no worse.

My photo QSC16

First of all, I should write some words about the conference itself. QSC is an acronym for Qualys Security Conference. It is clear from the name that it is fully dedicated to Qualys products.

Who might be interested in such event?

Mainly, of course, current and potential users of Qualys products, partners, competitors (from own experience, they are not welcomed there ;-)) and, I think it is the smallest group, analysts of Vulnerability Management market and Vulnerability Assessment geeks, like me. For people, who are sincerely interested in VM market changes, road show of the global VM vendor with the biggest market share (is it right, Gartner?) is a precious information source. Here you can learn about real experiences in the use of Qualys products and hear about the company’s future plans.

BTW, if you are one of those, and we do not know each other, we should definitely have a talk. 😉

QSC Agenda

Why is this event important? Despite existing skepticism about mono-vendor conferences and roadshows, QSC is one of the few events in Europe dedicated to the VM, in the broad sense of the term, almost exclusively. All discussions are, of course, in the context of Qualys solutions and you won’t hear any real critics of the vendor, however questions raised there are relevant for the entire VM market.

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PCI DSS 3.2 and Vulnerability Intelligence

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PCI DSS 3.2 and Vulnerability Intelligence. Establish a process to identify security vulnerabilities, using reputable outside sources for security vulnerability information… It’s one of the requirements of PCI DSS v3.2 (The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). It’s not about regular scans, as you could think. It is actually about monitoring web-sites and mailing lists where information about vulnerabilities is published. It’s very similar to what Vulnerability Intelligence systems have to do, isn’t it? A great opportunity for me to speculate about this class of products and deal with related PCI requirement. In this post I will mention following solutions: Flexera VIM, Rapid7 Nexpose NOW, Vulners.com and Qualys ThreatPROTECT.

PCI DSS 3.2 and Vulnerability Intelligence

Term “Vulnerability Intelligence” is almost exclusively used by only one security company – Secunia, or how it is called now Flexera Software. But I like this term more than “Threat Intelligence”, a term that many VM vendor use, but historically it is more about traffic and network attacks. Let’s see how Vulnerability Intelligence solutions was developed, and how they can be used (including requirements of PCI Compliance).

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PHDays VI: The Standoff

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PHDays VI: The Standoff. A week ago I was at PHDays (Positive Hack Days) 2016 conference. For those who don’t know, there are two main events for security practitioners in Russia: PHDays in May and ZeroNights in November. Day-Night. Like this play on words. =)

phdays_logo

So, it was my 6th PHDays. I visited them all. But on this one for a first time I was as an ordinary visitor and not from organizers side. To be honest, I have never participated in organizing of PHDays, and just seen the final result. So, nothing changed much for me. As usual, organization was at very high level. And it’s not just my opinion, but the opinion of many participants.

Sad things first. And they are likely sad only for me. You know my passion to vulnerability assessment/management systems and scanners. So, despite the fact that Positive Technologies are the organizers of this event and Maxpatrol is still their’s flagman product, it was hard to hear anything related to vulnerability assessment/risk assessment/threat intelligence on PHDays. Isn’t it strange? Could you imagine this at Qualys QSC or Tenable event? Nothing much about critical controls and IT compliance in general.

It’s clear that vulnerability assessment is not already in trends in Russia. All are crazy about SIEM and slightly less about Anti-APT and SCADA security. Sad, but true.

Anyway, I have seen many interesting presentations about honeypots, computer forensics, machine learning and security startups. I also visited a SIEM roundtable with representatives of Positive Technologies, First Russian SIEM (RuSIEM), ArcSight, IBM Qradar, Splunk, and Cisco Systems. More details under the cut.

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