Tag Archives: Tenable

My thoughts on the “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment”. What about the quality?

1 Reply

My thoughts on the “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment”. What about the quality? The Gartner Vulnerability Management Reports are one of the few marketing reports that I try to read regularly. This started back in the days when I was working for a VM vendor doing competitive analysis. Gartner is one of the few organizations that think about Vulnerability Assessment and Vulnerability Management and clearly articulate where we are and where we are going.

I got a free reprint of “2021 Gartner Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment” from the Tenable website. Thanks a lot to them for that.

Let’s start with what I liked:

  1. It’s great that Gartner has made vulnerability prioritization technology (VPT) a separate class of solutions, that do not detect vulnerabilities themselves, but work with them. For example, Kenna or my Vulristics. And it could be additional functionality like Tenable VPR.
  2. I liked the focus on EDR as a promising VM replacement. Especially, Microsoft solutions (Defender for Endpoint or as was mentioned in the report Microsoft’s Threat & Vulnerability Management, TVM).
  3. It’s nice that various areas related to Vulnerability Management have been mentioned: Pentest, Bug Bounty, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS).
  4. An interesting diagram that shows that VA is primarily about “Assess” and “Asset Management”, VPT is primarily about “Prioritize” and “Workflow Management”, BAS is primarily about “Compensate” and “Security Controls”.

Now what I didn’t like. I have one pain point – the quality of the scanning. And here, on the one hand, something was said, but on the other, it was not enough and not as definite as I would like. Market Direction is the most interesting section of the document. And it was the most painful to read.

Continue reading →

AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 1: Full video in Russian + Timecodes in English

1 Reply

AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 1: Full video in Russian + Timecodes in English. Hello all! 2 weeks ago I participated in the best online event fully dedicated to Vulnerability Management in Russia. It was super fun and exciting. Thanks to all the colleagues and especially to Lev Paley for the great moderation! I have talked out completely. Everything I wanted and the way I wanted. It seems that not a single hot topic was missed.

AM LIve: Vulnerability Management conference

You can see the two hours video below. It is in Russian. And it’s pretty complicated to translate it all. I won’t event try. ? If you don’t understand Russian you can try auto-generated and auto-translated subtitles on YouTube, but the quality is far from ideal.

To give you the idea what we were talking about I added the timecodes in English.

Timecodes

Section 1. Vulnerability Management Process and Solutions

  • 5:18 Vulnerability Management Process Definition
  • 10:53 Vulnerability Management is the opposite of the admin’s saying “If it works – don’t touch it!” The main thing in the process is to somehow fix the vulnerabilities. (Leonov)
  • 12:30 Sometimes a basic vulnerability scanner and Jira is already a Vulnerability Management solution (Leonov)
  • 13:30 Difference between Vulnerability Management Solutions and Vulnerability Scanners
  • 17:09 Vulnerability Management and Vulnerability Scanners: “in our restaurant we call rusks “croutons”, because a rusk cannot cost $8, but crouton can“ (Leonov)
  • 23:00 Licensing schemes, delivery options and costs
  • 28:48 Module-based licensing and the situations when modules can be excluded from the subscription (Paley)
  • 30:24 Commercial Vulnerability Management solutions are expensive, especially when licensed per host (Leonov)
  • 31:00 Maxpatrol unlimited licenses (Bengin)
  • 34:08 Perimeter scanning: very critical, low reliability of banner-based detections, it’s better to assess hosts accessible from the Internet with internal authenticated scans. Criticality of the network as an element of scoring. (Leonov)
  • 36:50 The impact of Regulators on the Vulnerability Management Market, a free ScanOVAL tool
  • 39:10 What to do with vulnerabilities in local software products that are not supported by foreign VM vendors?
  • 44:00 When it’s enough to use a free scanner? Could there be a full-functional and free vulnerability scanner? In theory, yes, but it is not clear how the vendor will finance the maintenance of the knowledge base. In practice, we see how such stories collapse. You need to understand the limitations of free products (such as OpenVAS). Including the completeness of the scan results and the ease of building the VM process. (Leonov)
  • 47:19 Poll: what is used in your organization?

Continue reading →

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

1 Reply

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.

Continue reading →

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

1 Reply

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.

Continue reading →

Barapass, Tsunami scanner, vulnerabilities in Windows DNS Server and SAP products, weird attack on Twitter

1 Reply

Barapass, Tsunami scanner, vulnerabilities in Windows DNS Server and SAP products, weird attack on Twitter. This episode is based on posts from my Telegram channel avleonovcom, published in the last 2 weeks. So, if you use Telegram, please subscribe. I update it frequently.

Barapass, Tsunami scanner, vulnerabilities in Windows DNS Server and SAP products, weird attack on Twitter

Barapass update

I recently released an update to my password manager barapass. BTW, it seems to be my only pet project at the MVP stage, which I use every day.

What’s new:

  1. Now I am sure that it works on Windows 10 without WSL. And you can run it beautifully even with the icon. ? Read more about installation in Windows in this file.
  2. Not only “copy the next value to the clipboard” (or “revolver mode” ) is now possible in the search results section. You can also get the previous value or copy the same value one again if it was somehow erased in the clipboard. Previously, I had to retype the search request each time to do this, and it was quite annoying. By the way, I unexpectedly discovered that the user input history inside the application magically works in the Windows shell (using up and down arrows) without any additional coding. On Linux it does not.
  3. You can set a startup command, for example, to decrypt the container.
  4. The startup command and quick (favorite) commands are now in settings.json and not hard-coded.
  5. settings.json, container files and decrypted files are now in “files” directory. It became more convenient to update barapass, just change the scripts in the root directory and that’s it. I divided the scripts into several files, now it should be more clear how it works.

So, if you need a minimalistic console password manager in which you can easily use any encryption you like – welcome! You can read more about barapass in my previous post.

Continue reading →

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

Leave a reply

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

Continue reading →

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

1 Reply

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

Continue reading →