Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for July 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between June and July Patch Tuesdays.
As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities.
Vulristics improvements
I optimized the detection of the vulnerable product and the type of vulnerability based on the description. Now processing already downloaded data (with option --rewrite-flag "False") takes a few seconds. For example, only ~3 seconds for 100 MS Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities . It used to take a few minutes.
What I’ve done:
For Microsoft generated descriptions, e.g. “Microsoft Excel Remote Code Execution Vulnerability”, vulnerability type and product are now directly parsed out of the description, keyword search is not performed.
I rewrote the generic keyword search based on products.json. I have reduced the use of heavy functions without sacrificing the quality of the detections.
Hello everyone! In my English-language telegram chat avleonovchat, the question was asked: “How to find zero day vulnerabilities with Qualys?” Apparently this question can be expanded. Not just with Qualys, but with any VM solution in general. And is it even possible? There was an interesting discussion.
Image generated by Stable Diffusion 2.1: “calendar on the wall cyber security vulnerability zero day”
The question is not so straightforward. To answer it, we need to define what a Zero Day vulnerability is. If we look at wikipedia, then historically “0” is the number of days a vendor has to fix a vulnerability.
“Eventually the term was applied to the vulnerabilities that allowed this hacking, and to the number of days that the vendor has had to fix them.”
Hello everyone! In this episode, let’s take a look at the Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2022 vulnerabilities. I use my Vulristics vulnerability prioritization tool as usual. I take comments for vulnerabilities from Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7, ZDI and Kaspersky blog posts. Also, as usual, I take into account the vulnerabilities added between the July and August Patch Tuesdays.
There were 147 vulnerabilities. Urgent: 1, Critical: 0, High: 36, Medium: 108, Low: 2.
There was a lot of great stuff this Patch Tuesday. There was a critical exploited in the wild MSDT DogWalk vulnerability, 3 critical Exchange vulnerabilities that could be easily missed in prioritization, 13 potentially dangerous vulnerabilities, 2 funny vulnerabilities and 3 mysterious ones. Let’s take a closer look.
Hello everyone! In this episode, I will try to revive Security News with a focus on Vulnerability Management.
On the one hand, creating such reviews requires free time, which could be spent more wisely, for example, on open source projects or original research. On the other hand, there are arguments in favor of news reviews. Keeping track of the news is part of our job as vulnerability and security specialists. And preferably not only headlines.
I usually follow the news using my automated telegram channel @avleonovnews. And it looks like this: I see something interesting in the channel, I copy it to Saved Messages so that I can read it later. Do I read it later? Well, usually not. Therefore, the creation of news reviews motivates to read and clear Saved Messages. Just like doing Microsoft Patch Tuesday reviews motivates me to watch what’s going on there. In general, it seems it makes sense to make a new attempt. Share in the comments what you think about it. Well, if you want to participate in the selection of news, I will be glad too.
I took 10 news items from Saved Messages and divided them into 5 categories:
Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2022 and new improvements in my Vulristics project. I decided to add more comment sources. Because it’s not just Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7 and ZDI make Microsoft Patch Tuesday reviews, but also other security companies and bloggers.
You can see them in my automated security news telegram channel avleonovnews after every second Tuesday of the month. So, now you can add any links with CVE comments to Vulristics.
Hello everyone! After a two-year break, I took part in Moscow CISO Forum 2022 with a small talk “Malicious open source: the cost of using someone else’s code”.
CISO Forum is the first major Russian conference since the beginning of The New Reality of Information Security (TNRoIS). My presentation was just on this topic. How malicious commits in open source projects change development and operations processes. I will make a separate video about this (upd. added Malicious Open Source: the cost of using someone else’s code). In this episode, I would like to tell you a little about the conference itself.
This is my personal blog. The opinions expressed here are my own and not of my employer. All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners. All company, product and service names used here for identification purposes only. Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement. You can freely use materials of this site, but it would be nice if you place a link on https://avleonov.com and send message about it at me@avleonov.com or contact me any other way.