Tag Archives: Qualys

Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner

12 Replies

Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner. This will be a practical confirmation of my thesis from “Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side“: the scanner for one operating system is easy to make. I also want to demonstrate that data collection and data analysis for Vulnerability Assessment may be successfully performed separately. There is no need to take the data directly from the vulnerable hosts, when it is already stored somewhere else, for example in IT monitoring systems.

Assessment without vulnerability scanner

The opacity of data collection and the need to have a privileged account on the remote host, traditionally causes conflicts between IS and IT departments and complicates implementation of VM process.

So, to detect vulnerabilities on our Linux host we need to know what version of the packages contain vulnerabilities, which versions of packages are installed on our hosts, and learn how to compare versions.

How do I know which versions of packages are vulnerable?

Vulnerable versions of packages are listed in official security bulletins:
RHEL – https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016:0304
CentOS – https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2015-April/021064.html
Debian – http://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3197
Ubuntu – http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2537-1/

CESA bulletin example

Of course, you will need to parse them first. Or you can just download the same content already parsed and presented in JSON format with Vulners.
download CESA bulletins from Vulners
Continue reading →

Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side

8 Replies

Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side. Original article was published in Information Security Magazine #2, 2016 (in Russian)

Vulnerability scanner is a computer program or hardware appliance designed to detect security problems on hosts in computer network. What kind of problems? Well, problems that may occur if some critical security updates were not installed on time or the system was not configured securely. In practice, this situation often occurs and it makes hacking the systems easy even for inexperienced attacker.

If it is all about checking, maybe it’s possible to do it manually? Yes, sure, but it requires a lot of specific expertise, accuracy and time. That’s why vulnerability scanners, which can automate network audit, have become standard tools in the arsenal of information security experts.

I worked for a long time in the development department of well-known vulnerability scanning vendor and was making a lot of competitive analysis as well. At current time, I use vulnerability scanners as an end user. So, in this article I will try to look at the main problems of this class of products from the vendor and from the end user side.

how-users-see-the-vm-vendors-how-vm-vendors-see-the-users

How vulnerability scanner detects vulnerabilities?

Detection methods are usually well known and uncomplicated: vulnerability scanner somehow detects software version installed on a host. If version is less then secure version of this software (known from the public bulletin) – vulnerability exists and the software should be updated. If not – everything is ok. As a rule, vulnerability scanners try to guess installed versions by opened ports and service banners, or scanner may just have a full remote access to the host and able to perform all necessary commands (it is the most accurate and effective way).
Continue reading →

PCI DSS 3.2 and Vulnerability Intelligence

2 Replies

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).

Continue reading →

When a free scanning service detects vulnerabilities better

4 Replies

When a free scanning service detects vulnerabilities better. We all want to have a reliable and efficient Vulnerability Scanner. This scanner should be able to find any vulnerabilities immediately, as soon as the information about them is published. And, to be honest, no one wants to research how the scanner do it. Really. It’s not our job. We purchased the product, we trust the vendor and if this product does not work as we would like, it is a vendor’s problem. Is that right?

Not really. If we do not properly recognize the condition of our infrastructure and do not properly assess the risks, because of this vendor’s faults, this would be our problem. It’s relatively easily to find out that some detected vulnerabilities from scanning report are false positives, what if scanner didn’t find an existing vulnerability? How would you even know this happened?

That’s why we still have to understand how the scanners work, to watch the watcher.

A recent example. CVE-2016-2107: OpenSSL AES CBC cipher information disclosure.

upd. For this vulnerability Tenable released addition detection plugin: “Use multiple vulnerability scanners in the name of good”.

HT Bridge detects CVE-2016-2107 vulnerability, Nessus not

This vulnerability may be detected by free vulnerability scanning services and practically could not detected by Nessus via unauthenticated scanning. You can see on the screenshots how we have scanned the same host with Nessus and free service by High-Tech Bridge. And Nessus did not detect CVE-2016-2107.

Continue reading →

PHDays VI: The Standoff

3 Replies

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.

Continue reading →

High-Tech Bridge service and API for SSL/TLS server testing

7 Replies

High-Tech Bridge service and API for SSL/TLS server testing. Another great free SSL security testing service — High-Tech Bridge SSL Server Test (and Free API). I have already reviewed something quite familiar – Qualys SSL Labs client. So naturally there will be an element of comparison.

High-Tech Bridge SSL/TLS test request

Why have I tried something else after Qualys SSL Labs? The thing is Qualys doesn’t support IP addresses as a target. Maybe they don’t want it to be used for assessing full IP-ranges. I don’t know. But the fact is “IP addresses are not allowed”.

Continue reading →

Qualys SSL Labs console client

5 Replies

Qualys SSL Labs console client. Qualys SSL Labs is a free online service, which performs a deep analysis of web server SSL configuration and detects some common OpenSSL vulnerabilities either (e.g. Heartbleed).

Qualys SSL Lab Report

This service has an API and official console client, that could be used to automate security assessment.

Qualys SSL Labs official console client ssllabs-scan

Continue reading →