My short review of “IDC Worldwide Security and Vulnerability Management Market Shares 2016”. On February 12 IDC published new report about Security and Vulnerability Management market. You can buy it on the official website for $4500. Or you can simply download free extract on Qualys website (Thanks, Qualys!). I’ve read it and now I want to share my impressions.
I think it’s better start reading this report from the end, from “MARKET DEFINITION” section. First of all, IDC believe that there is a “Security and Vulnerability Management” (SVM) market. It consists of two separate “symbiotic markets”: security management and vulnerability assessment (VA).
Kenna Security: Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data. I’ve been following Kenna Security (before 2015 Risk I/O) for a pretty long time. Mainly, because they do the things I do on a daily basis: analyse various vulnerability scan results and feeds, and prioritize detected vulnerabilities for further mitigation. The only difference is that my scripts and reports are highly specific for my employer’s infrastructure and needs. And guys from Kenna team make a standardized scalable cloud solution that should be suitable for everyone.
I think their niche is really great. They do not compete directly with Vulnerability Management vendors. They can be partners with any of them, bringing additional features to the customers. Perfect win-win combination. That’s why Kenna speakers regularly participate in joint webinars with VM vendors.
I couldn’t lose a great opportunity to see Kenna Security service in action. 😉
In this post I will try to make a very brief review of Kenna functionality and formulate pros and cons of the solution.
Vulnerability Management for Network Perimeter. Network Perimeter is like a door to your organization. It is accessible to everyone and vulnerability exploitation does not require any human interactions, unlike, for example, phishing attacks. Potential attacker can automate most of his actions searching for an easy target. It’s important not to be such of target. 😉
What does it mean to control the network perimeter? Well, practically this process consist of two main parts:
Assessing application servers, e.g. Web Servers, on these hosts using some special tools, e.g. Web Application Scanners (Acunetix, Burp Suite, Qualys WAS, Tenable.io WAS, High-Tech Bridge ImmuniWeb, etc.)
Active scanning is a good method of perimeter assessment. Dynamics of the assets is relatively low, comparing with the Office Network. Perimeter hosts usually stays active all the time, including the time when you are going to scan scanning them. 😉
Most of the dangerous vulnerabilities can be detected without authorization: problems with encryption (OpenSSL Heartbleed, Poodle, etc.).RCE and DoS of web servers and frameworks (Apache Struts and Equifax case)
The best results can be achieved with scanners deployed outside of your network. Thus, you will see your Network Perimeter the same way a potential attacker sees it. But certainly, you will be in a better position:
You can ask your IT administrators to add your network and WAS scanners in white list, so they will not be banned.
You can check and correlate scan results of remote scanner with (authenticated?) scan results produced by the scanner deployed in your organization’s network and thus filtering false positives.
What about the targets for scanning? How should you get them?
ZeroNights 2017: back to the cyber 80s. Last Friday, 17th of November, I attended the ZeroNights 2017 conference in Moscow. And it was pretty awesome. Thanks to the organizers! Here I would like to share some of my impressions.
First of all, I want to say that two main Moscow events for information security practitioners, PHDays and ZeroNights, provide an excellent opportunity to meet all of the colleagues at once and to synchronize current views on important information security issues, including, of course, Vulnerability Management, the most relevant for me. My opinion is that this year’s behind-the-scene conversations were especially good. And this is the most valuable characteristic for the event.
Every ZeroNights event has it’s own style. This time it was some geeky cyber retro from 1980s, like in popular cult movie Kung Fury. The place was also changed from familiar Cosmos Hotel to ZIL Culture Centre. It is the largest Palace of Culture from the Soviet Moscow times. The combination of US 80s cultural artifacts, RETROWAVE music with Soviet-style interiors (including, for example, statue of Lenin) made a pretty weird combination, but I liked it =)
I was unintentionally taking photos using some strange mode in camera and recorded a very short video fragment (3-5 seconds) for each photo. I decided to combine this fragments in a small video. This does not make much sense, but, perhaps, someone will find this “time-lapse” interesting 😉
Among the great presentations and workshops, there were also a small exhibition. This year there was two Vulnerability Management vendors: Beyond Security and Qualys.
Vulnerability Management vendors and massive Malware attacks (following the Bad Rabbit). After the latest Bad Rabbit ransomware attack all Top VM vendors Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7 wrote blog posts on this topic on the same day. Two days later Tripwire also published own review. Why do they care? They do not make antiviruses, endpoint protection or firewalls – the common tools against this kind of threats. So, what’s the point?
Well, they do it is obviously to promote their products and services. But how exactly?
Problems of Vulnerability Prioritization and Detection. It’s the third part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show “Safe Environment” recorded 29.03.2017. In this part we talk about Vulnerability Prioritization and Detection:
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)
Environmental factor
Manual and automated vulnerability detection
Unauthenticated and authenticated scanning
Why vulnerability scanners are so expensive and why the can’t detect everything
Video with manually transcribed Russian/English subtitles:
Prioritization
– Here also the question how to prioritize vulnerabilities properly. Because if you have, as you said, two Linux servers and 20 workstations running Windows, then in principle, you may not need to do prioritization. But if you have fifteen hundred servers: some of them are on perimeter, some are in your DMZ, some are in the internal network. It is still necessary, probably, to understand correctly which vulnerabilities and where should be patched in in the first place.
Yes, this is absolutely true and it’s a very good question. How to prioritize?
Common Vulnerability Scoring System
A natural way. If we look at vulnerabilities with a CVE identifier, for them in the US National Vulnerability Database we can find CVSS Base Score. It is an assessment of vulnerability criticality level.
How is it calculated?
Some person fills the questionnaire: can it be remotely exploited – no, is there public exploit – no, etc.
The result is a CVSS vector – this is a line in which you can see the main characteristics of this vulnerability and CVSS Base score is the score from 0 to 10 depending on criticality.
This is a natural way of prioritization. But sometimes this method does not give very good results.
Carbon Blacking your sensitive data it’s what the agents normally do. But usually without such consequences. In this situation with Carbon Black, I am most interested in the actual reasons of all this media noise. From what point business as usual becomes a scandal. Ok, when you see Carbon Black customer’s private files in public access at Virus Total it’s a 100% epic fail. But what about other options.
Agent makes file analysis by himself on user’s host. It’s probably ok. Some paranoid person, like me, may say that it’s possible that data may leak during the update process, like in case of M.E.Doc. But it probably can be detected it in traffic somehow.
Agent sends file to the vendor’s cloud for further analysis in some private multiscanner. Vendor will have copy of your private data. What if this data will leak? Are you sure that vendor will bear responsibility for this?
Agent sends file to vendor’s cloud, vendor than sends it to some third-party for analysis. Are you sure vendors that you use doesn’t do this? How can you investigate this? What will be your next actions if you figure out that they do it without your permission?
Agent sends file to the vendor’s cloud, vendor then sends it to some third-party for analysis, third-party opens access to this file for a wide range of people.
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Illustration from