Qualys new look and new products. As you all know, it’s Black Hat 2017 time. This year Qualys seems to be the main newsmaker among Vulnerability Management vendors. Qualys Team renewed logo and website, updated marketing strategy, presented two new products: CloudView and CertView. I decided to take a look.
Talking about design, I liked the old logo more. I don’t see “Q” here. Mirrored “9” maybe. 🙂 However, I did not like the blue nut of Tenable before and now it looks right and familiar.
Site design was also changed and simplified. I really liked well-structured qualys.com, where and every scan mode (“Cloud Apps”) had it’s own color and icon.
PHDays VII: To Vulnerability Database and beyond. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, May 23-24, I attended PHDays VII conference in Moscow. I was talking there about vulnerability databases and the evolution process of vulnerability assessment tools, as far as I understand it.
But first of all, a few words about the conference itself. I can tell that since the last year the event got even better. I’ve seen lot of new faces. Some people I didn’t know, but they knew me by my blog and accounts in social networks. What a strange, strange time we live in! I was very pleased to see and to talk with you all, guys! 🙂
PHDays is one of the few events that truly brings all Russian community of security professionals together. I’ve seen people I have studied with in university, colleagues from the all places where I have been worked, and nearly all researchers and security practitioners that I follow. Big thanks for the organizers, Positive Technologies, for such an amazing opportunity!
It is also a truly international event. You can see speakers from all over the world. And all information is available both in Russian and English. Almost all slides are in English. Three parallel streams of reports, workshops and panel discussions were dubbed by professional simultaneous interpreters, like it is a United Nations sessions or something, recorded and broadcast live by the team of operators and directors. Final result looks really great.
Video of my presentation:
I was talking too fast and used some expressions that was hard to translate. The translator, however, did an awesome job. He is my hero! 🙂 If you didn’t understand something on video, I made a transcript bellow.
A version without translation for Russian-speakers is here.
Slides:
Unfortunately gif animation is not working in the Slideshare viewer.
Today I would like to discuss vulnerability databases and how vulnerability assessment systems has been evolving. Prior to discussing vulnerability databases I need to say that any vulnerability is just a software error, a bug, that allowing hacker to do some cool things. Software developers and vendors post information about such vulnerabilities on their websites. And there are tons and tones of vendors, and websites, and software products, and vulnerabilities.
New vulnersBot for Telegram with advanced searches and subscriptions.Vulners.com team have recently presented a new version of vulnerability intelligence bot for Telegram messenger. Now you can search for vulnerabilities and other security content by talking with bot.
Searches
For example, I’ve heard about new critical vulnerability in Samba called SambaCry by analogy with famous WannaCry. Let’s see what Vulners knows about it.
Ok, I see it has id CVE-2017-7494. Do we have exploits related to this vulnerability? cvelist:CVE-2017-7494 AND bulletinFamily:”exploit”
What’s interesting in this document? First of all, Josh Zelonis and co-authors presented their version of VM products evolution. It consists of this steps (I have reformulated them a bit for the copyright reasons) :
Initial fear of automated vulnerability assessment tools
Mid-1990s and first productized offerings
Authenticated scanning dramatically improved accuracy of scans
Application scanning (DAST)
Security assessment of software containers and DevOps in general.
And of course, things that sales people say to you should be always taken with some skepticism. Only concrete implementation tested in your environment matters. But they usually mention some useful ideas that can be perceived independently from the products they promote. Continue reading →
Selenium, SikuliX and Social Network posting. The last post was about SikuliX. It’s fair to say that it’s not optimal for web applications automation. For such applications, it’s better to use something, that will natively work with your web-browse. The first solution that comes to mind is, of course, Selenium.
Selenium is a portable software-testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without the need to learn a test scripting language.
This app is released under the Apache 2.0 license and is a very common tool for Quality Assurance (QA). It can be also used in Information Security. For example, you can upload Selenium scripts in Qualys WAS (Web Application Scanner) to help scanner in performing some complex operations, for example in authentication on the website.
Selenium is available in a form of two products: Selenium WebDriver for some hardcore automation and web-browser plugin Selenium IDE, which will help you to create and run scripts. I chose Selenium IDE.
Gartner’s view on Vulnerability Management market. Not so long time ago Gartner’s report “Vulnerability Management an essential piece of the security puzzle” has become publicly available. Now you can read it for free by filling out a questionnaire on F-Secure website.
At the bottom of the document there is a reference to Gartner G00294756 from 05 December 2016. This document is quite fresh, especially for not very dynamic VM market ;-), and pretty expensive. Thanks for F-secure, we can read it now for free. If you are wondering why this anti-virus company is sponsoring Gartner VM reports: year ago they have bought Finnish VM vendor nScence, and I even did a small review of this product (F-Secure Radar Vulnerability Management solution, F-Secure Radar basic reporting, F-Secure Radar ticketing, F-Secure API for scanning).
Talking about the document, I would like, firstly, to thank Gartner. Do you know who writes most articles about VM? Of course, VM vendors. And we all understand that their main goal is to promote their own products. Reports of independent consulting firms, primarily IDC, Forrester and Gartner, allow us to get some balanced view from the side. It is very important.
Here I would like to comment some theses of the text.
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