Tag Archives: remediation

September episode of “In The Trend of VM”: 7 CVEs, fake reCAPTCHA, lebanese pagers, VM and IT annual bonuses

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September episode of “In The Trend of VM”: 7 CVEs, fake reCAPTCHA, lebanese pagers, VM and IT annual bonuses. Starting this month, we decided to slightly expand the topics of the videos and increase their duration. I cover not only the trending vulnerabilities of September, but also social engineering cases, real-world vulnerability exploitation, and practices of vulnerability management process. At the end we announce a contest of questions about Vulnerability Management with gifts. 🎁

📹 Video “In The Trend of VM” on YouTube
🗞 A post on Habr (rus) a slightly expanded script of the video
🗒 A compact digest on the official PT website

Content:

🔻 00:51 Elevation of Privilege – Windows Installer (CVE-2024-38014) and details about this vulnerability
🔻 02:42 Security Feature Bypass – Windows Mark of the Web “LNK Stomping” (CVE-2024-38217)
🔻 03:50 Spoofing – Windows MSHTML Platform (CVE-2024-43461)
🔻 05:07 Remote Code Execution – VMware vCenter (CVE-2024-38812)
🔻 06:20 Remote Code Execution – Veeam Backup & Replication (CVE-2024-40711), while the video was being edited, data about exploitation in the wild appeared
🔻 08:33 Cross Site Scripting – Roundcube Webmail (CVE-2024-37383)
🔻 09:31 SQL Injection – The Events Calendar plugin for WordPress (CVE-2024-8275)
🔻 10:30 Human vulnerabilities: fake reCAPTCHA
🔻 11:45 Real world vulnerabilities: еxplosions of pagers and other electronic devices in Lebanon and the consequences for the whole world
🔻 14:42 Vulnerability management process practices: tie annual bonuses of IT specialists to meeting SLAs for eliminating vulnerabilities
🔻 16:03 Final and announcement of the contest
🔻 16:24 Backstage

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Ford won’t work?

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Ford won't work?

Ford won’t work? There were a lot of comments about “paying vulnerability fixers only when they are in the break room“. I’ll say right away that the post was a joke. Staff motivation is too delicate a topic to give serious recommendations. 🙂

But I will sort out the objections:

🔻 IT staff will sabotage the vulnerability detection process by tweaking host configs. So that the scanner will produce only green reports. But IT staff can do this at any time, and we need to take this into account. 🤷‍♂️

🔻 IT staff will simply turn off hosts. If they can do this without harming the business, that’s great. 👍 And if this will break the production environment, then let them deal with their IT management. 😏

🔻 There is an opinion that the method is good, but only 2% of vulnerabilities used in attack chains need to be fixed. I traditionally DO NOT agree with the possibility of reliably separating these mythical 2% of vulnerabilities. Everything needs to be fixed. 😉

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Vulnerability Remediation using the “Ford Method”

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Vulnerability Remediation using the Ford Method

Vulnerability Remediation using the “Ford Method”. There is a popular story in the Russian segment of the Internet. Allegedly, an experiment was carried out at Henry Ford’s plant: conveyor repair workers were paid only for the time they were in the break room. And as soon as the conveyor stopped 🚨 and the repair workers went to fix it, they stopped getting paid. Therefore, they did their work quickly and efficiently, so that they could quickly (and for a long time) return to the break room and start earning money again. 👷‍♂️🪙

I did not find any reliable evidence of this. 🤷‍♂️

But what if the specialists responsible for vulnerability remediation were paid only for the time when vulnerabilities are not detected on their hosts. 🤔 This can have a very positive impact on the speed and quality of remediation. Unsolvable problems will quickly become solvable, and automation of testing and deployment of updates will develop at the fastest pace. 😏

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Code IB 2019: Vulnerability Management Masterclass

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Code IB 2019: Vulnerability Management Masterclass. On March 29, I held one hour master class “HOW to avoid excessive formalism in Vulnerability Management process” at Code IB Profi 2019. Everything went quite well and I’ve got 88% positive ratings. Not bad result ^_^.

The main feature of the conference was a very special audience. The only way to visit this event was to buy a real ticket (there were no promotional codes, invites, free tickets from sponsors, etc.). So, the people who came were really interested in the content. Target audience: CISO, their deputies, leading experts from all industries. The whole event was up to 200 people, it lasted for 2 days with 4 threads of masterclasses.

This year organizers decided that titles of all masterclasses should start with “How to” (to keep them practical) and there should be checklists for each masterclass as a handout. I am going to translate my checklist Into English and publish it in this blog soon.

In fact, there were 2 masterclasses on Vulnerability Management at the conference! The second was held by Lev Paley. However, our content did not intersect: I spoke mostly about technical stuff (and I criticized VM vendors as usual), and he spoke mainly about the organizational part and high-level processes.

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Vulnerability Management vendors and Vulnerability Remediation problems

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Vulnerability Management vendors and Vulnerability Remediation problems. It’s not a secret, that Vulnerability Management vendors don’t pay much attention to the actual process of fixing vulnerabilities, that they detect in the infrastructure (Vulnerability Remediation). Although it seems to be the main goal of VM products: to make vulnerabilities fixed and whole IT infrastructure more secure, right?

In fact, most of VM vendors see their job in finding a potential problem and providing a link to the Software Vendor’s website page with the remediation description. How exactly the remediation will be done is not their business.

Vulnerability Management vendors and Vulnerability Remediation

The reason is clear. Remediation is a painful topic and it’s difficult to sell it as a ready-made solution. And even when Vulnerability Vendors try to sell it this way, it turns out pretty ugly and does not really work. Mainly because the Remediation feature is sold to the Security Team, and the IT Team will have to use it.

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Guinea Pig and Vulnerability Management products

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Guinea Pig and Vulnerability Management products. IMHO, security vendors use the term “Vulnerability Management” extremely inaccurate. Like a guinea pig, which is not a pig and is not related to Guinea, the current Vulnerability Management products are not about the actual (practically exploitable) vulnerabilities and not really about the management.

Guinea Pig and Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability should mean something solid and reliable, something that can be practically used by a malicious attacker or penetration tester.

When (so-called) Vulnerability Management vendors start working with indirect information from third-party about potential vulnerabilities in the software, that were possibly exploited by someone in some unknown conditions, or simply distance from responsibility: “we just provide information from the software vendor; software vendor knows better about the vulnerabilities in his own products”, it’s all falling into to the area of fortune telling and counting angels on the head of a pin.

Hardcore process of identifying weaknesses that real-life attackers can use moves to a boring compliance. For example, as PCI DSS requires, there should be no vulnerabilities above medium level (CVSS Base score > 4). At the same time, no one cares how fair this assessment of criticality is or how real these vulnerabilities are. All the analytics build on such formal data loses its sharpness and practical value.

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Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation

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Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation. In my opinion, Remediation is the most difficult part of Vulnerability Management process. If you know the assets in your organization and can assess them, you will sooner or later produce a good enough flow of critical vulnerabilities. But what the point, if the IT team will not fix them?

Kübler-Ross model and Tsunami of Vulnerability Tasks

Kübler-Ross model and Tsunami of Vulnerability Remediation Tasks

Just think about it. The only thing that your colleagues from  IT team see is an unexpected  tsunami of the patching tasks. They most likely don’t understand WHY they should do it. They most likely don’t know about the concepts of Attack Surface minimization and Attack Cost maximization. From their point of view it’s just some stupid requirements from InfoSec team imposed with only one goal – to make their life miserable.

So, they may think that denial and pushing back can solve all their problems. And, frankly, this may work. There are countless ways to sabotage Vulnerability Remediation. Most main and common are the following:

  • I don’t understand how to patch this.
  • I already patched this, there should be a false positive in the scanner.
  • Why should we patch this? The vulnerability is not exploitable. Or it is exploitable in theory, but not exploitable in our particular infrastructure. Or this server is not critical and, even if it will be compromised, there won’t be a huge impact. So, we will not patch it.

In each individual case Vulnerability Analyst can describe and proof his point, but doing this for each vulnerability will require insane amount of time and efforts and will paralyze the work. It is basically the Italian strike or work-to-rule.

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