Tag Archives: Rapid7

Microsoft Patch Tuesday July 2023: Vulristics improvements, Office RCE, SFB SmartScreen and Outlook, EoP MSHTML and ERS, other RCEs

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for July 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between June and July Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239131

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
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Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2022: DogWalk, Exchange EOPs, 13 potentially dangerous, 2 funny, 3 mysterious vulnerabilities

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.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239098

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.

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Vulnerability Management news and publications #2

Hello everyone! This is the second episode of Vulnerability Management news and publications. In fact, this is a collection of my posts from the avleonovcom and avleonovrus telegram channels. Therefore, if you want to read them earlier, subscribe to these channels.

The main idea of ​​this episode. Microsoft is a biased company. In fact, they should now be perceived as another US agency. Does this mean that we need to forget about Microsoft and stop tracking what they do? No, it doesn’t. They do a lot of interesting things that can at least be researched and copied. Does this mean that we need to stop using Microsoft products? In some locations (you know which ones) for sure, in some we can continue to use such products if it is reasonable, but it’s necessary to have a plan B. And this does not only apply to Microsoft. So, it’s time for a flexible approaches. Here we do it this way, there we do it differently. It seems that rather severe fragmentation of the IT market is a long-term trend and it’s necessary to adapt to it.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239097

What’s in this episode:

  1. Microsoft released a propaganda report, what does this mean for us?
  2. Microsoft released the Autopatch feature, is it a good idea to use it?
  3. Ridiculous Vulnerability: Hardcoded Password in Confluence Questions
  4. The new Nessus Expert and why it’s probably Tenable’s worst release
  5. Rapid7 Nexpose/InsightVM features added in Q2 2022: what’s good and what’s weird
  6. Palo Alto: Malicious scan 15 minutes after CVE is released. Oh really?
  7. 6 groups of vulnerabilities that are most often used in attacks, according to Palo Alto, and the end of IT globalization
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Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2022 and custom CVE comments sources in Vulristics

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.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239085

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.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2022

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2022. I release it pretty late, because of the my previous big episode about the blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners. Please take a look if you haven’t seen it. Well, if you are even slightly interested in the world news, you can imagine that the end of February 2022 in Eastern Europe is not the best time to create new content on Vulnerability Management. Let’s hope that peace and tranquility will be restored soon. And also that geopolitical confrontation between the largest nuclear powers will de-escalate somehow.

But let’s get back to information security. While working on Microsoft Patch Tuesday report for February 2022, I made a lot of improvements to my open source project for vulnerability prioritization Vulristics. I want to start with them.

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Vulristics Vulnerability Score, Automated Data Collection and Microsoft Patch Tuesdays Q4 2020

In this episode I would like to make a status update of my Vulristics project. For those who don’t know, in this project I retrieve publicly available vulnerability data and analyze it to better understand the severity of these vulnerabilities and better prioritize them. Currently, it is mainly about Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities, but I have plans to go further. Also in this episode I want to demonstrate the new Vulristics features on Microsoft Patch Tuesday reports for October, November and December 2020.

Vulristics Vulnerability Scores, automated data collection and Microsoft Patch Tuesday Q4 2020

Patch Tuesdays Automated Data Collection

First of all, I dealt with the annoying collecting of the data for Microsoft Patch Tuesdays reports. Previously it took pretty long time. I had to go to Microsoft website and search for CVE IDs. After that, I had to get the comments from various Vulnerability Management vendors and researchers blogs (Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7, ZDI). I wanted this to be as much automated as possible. I have added some code to make CVE search requests on the Microsoft website for a date range (including the second Tuesday of the month). I also figured out how to make searches on the Vulnerability Management vendors blogs. So, now to get a Microsoft Patch Tuesday report it’s only necessary to set the year and month.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday September 2020: Zerologon and other exploits, RCEs in SharePoint and Exchange

I would like to start this post by talking about Microsoft vulnerabilities, which recently turned out to be much more serious than it seemed at first glance.

Older Vulnerabilities with exploits

“Zerologon” Netlogon RCE (CVE-2020-1472)

One of them is, of course, the Netlogon vulnerability from the August 2020 Patch Tuesday. It’s called “Zerologon”. I would not say that Vulnerability Management vendors completely ignored it. But none of them (well, maybe only ZDI) emphasized in their reports that this vulnerability would be a real disaster.

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