Tag Archives: RCE

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

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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

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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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Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2020: vulnerabilities with Detected Exploitation, useful for phishing and others

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This time I would like to review not only the vulnerabilities that were published in the last August Microsoft Patch Tuesday, but also the CVEs that were published on other, not Patch Tuesday, days. Of course, if there are any.

But let’s start with the vulnerabilities that were presented on MS Patch Tuesday on August 11th. There were 120 vulnerabilities: 17 of them are Critical and 103 Important. My vulristics script could not find public exploits for these vulnerabilities on Vulners.com.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday May 2020: comments from VM vendors, promising stuff for phishing, troubles with SharePoint and lulz with Visual Studio

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This will be my third Microsoft Patch Tuesday report in video and audio format. And for the third time in a row, Microsoft has addressed over a hundred vulnerabilities. With my Microsoft Patch Tuesday parser, it was possible to generate a report almost on the same day. But, of course, it takes much more time to describe the vulnerabilities manually.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday May 2020
  • All vulnerabilities: 111
  • Critical: 16
  • Important: 95
  • Moderate: 0
  • Low: 0

Last time I complained that different VM vendors release completely different reports for Microsoft Patch Tuesday. This time I decided that it’s not a bug, but a feature. I upgraded my script to not only show vulnerabilities, but also show how these vulnerabilities were mentioned in the reports of various VM vendors (Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7 and ZDI). In my opinion, it seems pretty useful.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2020: my classification script, confusing RCE in Adobe Type Manager and updates for older vulnerabilities

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Easiest task ever?

Making the reviews of Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities should be an easy task. All vulnerability data is publicly available. Even better, dozens of reviews have already been written. Just read them, combine and post. Right?

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2020: my classification script, confusing RCE in Adobe Type Manager and updates for older vulnerabilities

Not really. In fact it is quite boring and annoying. It may be fun to write about vulnerabilities that were already used in some real attacks. But this is a very small part of all vulnerabilities. What about more than a hundred others? They are like “some vulnerability in some component may be used in some attack (or may be not)”. If you describe each of them, no one will read or listen this.

You must choose what to highlight. And when I am reading the reports from Tenable, Qualys and ZDI, I see that they choose very different groups of vulnerabilities, pretty much randomly.

My classification script

That’s why I created a script that takes Patch Tuesday CVE data from microsoft.com and visualizes it giving me helicopter view on what can be interesting there. With nice grouping by vulnerability type and product, with custom icons for vulnerability types, coloring based on severity, etc.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 “Wormable” RCE and updates for February goldies

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SMBv3 “Wormable” RCE

Without a doubt, the hottest Microsoft vulnerability in March 2020 is the “Wormable” Remote Code Execution in SMB v3 CVE-2020-0796. The most commonly used names for this vulnerability are EternalDarkness, SMBGhost and CoronaBlue.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 "Wormable" RCE and updates for February goldies

There was a strange story of how it was disclosed. It seems like Microsoft accidentally mentioned it in their blog. Than they somehow found out that the patch for this vulnerability will not be released in the March Patch Tuesday. So, they removed the reference to this vulnerability from the blogpost as quickly as they could.

But some security experts have seen it. And, of course, after EternalBlue and massive cryptolocker attacks in 2017, each RCE in SMB means “OMG, this is happening again, we need to do something really fast!” So, Microsoft just had to publish an advisory for this vulnerability with the workaround ADV200005 and to release an urgent patch KB4551762.

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Is Vulnerability Management more about Vulnerabilities or Management?

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I’ve just read a nice article about Vulnerability Management in the Acribia blog (in Russian). An extract and my comments below.

In the most cases Vulnerability Management is not about Vulnerabilities, but about Management. Just filtering the most critical vulnerabilities is not enough.

Practical Cases:

  1. “Oh, yes, we know ourselves that that everything is bad!” – CVE-2013−4786 IPMI password hash disclosure on > 500 servers. Customer just accepted the risks, Acribia proposed an effective workaround (unbrutable user IDs and passwords). It’s often hard to figure out right remediation measures and implement them. Someone should do it!
  2. “We can download OpenVAS without your help!” – CVE-2018-0171 Cisco Smart Install RCE on 350 hosts. Vulnerability detection rules of several Vulnerability Scanners were not good enough to detect this vulnerability. Do not rely on scanners, know how they work and their limitations.
  3. “If the attackers wanted to hack us, they would have already done it!” – CVE-2017-0144 (MS17-010) Windows SMB RCE on domain controller and several other critical servers. Vulnerability was detected in infrastructure several times, the remediation was agreed with the management, but it was ignored by responsible IT guys. As a result, during the next successful WannaCry-like malware attack the servers, including the DC were destroyed. Vulnerability Management is about the willingness to patch anything, very quickly, as often as required. Otherwise, it makes no sense.