Tag Archives: vulners.com

Vulchain Scanner: 5 basic principles

2 Replies

New Year holidays in Russia lasts 10 days this year! Isn’t it an excellent opportunity to start a new project? So, I decided to make my own active network vulnerability scanner – Vulchain.

Why? Well, first of all, it’s fun. You can make the architecture from scratch, see the difficulties invisible from the user side and try something new in software development as well.

Vulchain modular scanner

Basic principles of the project. This is not a dogma, but rather a general direction.

  1. Data layers. I would like to have this independent sets of data:
    • Raw data collections
    • Software versions detected from the raw data
    • Vulnerabilities detected from the software versions
    • Exploitability assessment data for the detected vulnerabilities
  2. Modularity. Most of functionality will be performed by the independent modules which read some data from one data level, and create some data on other data level.
  3. Transparency. Data is stored constantly on the all levels. You can easily figure out how the data was  processed, track the errors and modify modules.
  4. Neutrality. All modules are independent and easily replaceable. For example:
  5. Rationality. If it is possible to use some security utility, service or product, we will integrate with them, rather than writing our own analogue. We spend resources only on what will give us the maximum profit at a minimum of costs. 😉

Continue reading →

Vulners Nmap plugin

2 Replies

In previous post about Vulners vulnerability detection plugins for Burp and Google Chrome, I mentioned that it would be great to have a plugin for some free publicly available tool, like Nmap. And guys from the Vulners Team have recently released Nmap plugin. Isn’t it awesome? 🙂

Vulners Nmap vulnerability detection plugin

To detect vulnerabilities with Vulners Nmap plugin, you need to download the script and run it like this:

$ wget -O vulners.nse https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vulnersCom/nmap-vulners/master/vulners.nse
$ nmap -sV --script vulners.nse corporation.com

The output you can see on the screenshot above.

First of all, I need to say that it’s not the full analogue of the plugins for Burp and Google Chrome.

In the current version it doesn’t analyse the content and headers of the site. It doesn’t detect vulnerabilities of standard Web applications. From the other hand, this plugin can detect vulnerabilities of network services, that plugins for Burp and Chrome obviously won’t detect.

Continue reading →

Microsoft security solutions against ransomware and APT

2 Replies

Last Tuesday I was invited to Microsoft business breakfast “Effective protection against targeted and multilevel attacks”. Here I would like to share some of my thoughts on this. Need to mention that the food was delicious and the restaurant of Russian Geographical Society is a very lovely place. 😉 Thanks, Microsoft!

Microsoft as a security vendor? O RLY?

Microsoft products are not actually my topic. To tell you the truth, personally I’d better live in a world without this massive Windows hegemony in desktop operating systems. I use Linux mostly. And even when I have to work in a Windows environment, it’s much easier for me to do all the work in some Linux virtual machine.

But in the real life almost every office network is build on Microsoft solutions. And if you are doing Vulnerability Management in any organization, you should deal with them too. The good news is that many security features are available out of the box in the MS products that you have already purchased. It’s just important to know about these features and use them right.

One more thing, why it’s interesting to learn more about Microsoft information security products. Microsoft developers, obviously, have direct access to Windows source code and know better how their own OS works. Many things are much easier for them to implement than for other security vendors. So, good chances that you will see in Microsoft products some interesting features, that other vendors don’t have (yet).

Drowning in data

The event began with an opening speech by Andrey Ivanov from Microsoft Russia.

Andrey Ivanov, "Effective protection against targeted and multilevel attacks"

I liked his thesis that “we are drowning in security data”:

  • Threat Intelligence from different sources that need to be implemented in your infrastructure and somehow validated. A good place to mention Vulners.com vulnerability feeds 😉
  • Threat Detection using logs, scanners, various protection tools, etc.
  • The overall number of SIEM inputs is growing faster than our resources. New IT system = new problems of SIEM configuration.

So, it would be nice if somebody, for example OS vendor, will provide all this as a service, right? 😉

Detect the undetectable

Then there was the keynote by Zbigniew Kukowski – one of the leading Microsoft information security experts.

Zbigniew Kukowski, "Effective protection against targeted and multilevel attacks"

Why is it necessary?

Here is what I would like to note from his report. First of all, great arguments why it is necessary. Ok, this is marketing. But the ability to explain (to sell) necessity of information security is important skill for any information security specialist now. It does not matter if you are working in a  security vendor, integrator or customer.

Zbigniew mentioned an interesting case: some Polish company, that lost $ 4.3 million in recent the Petya attack in 4 days. The cost of Information Security measures will be much less than the potential losses of business.

Another argument – attacks are not the entertainment for some individuals any more. Now it’s a well-organized criminal business. Dozens of people are working on popular malware tools, like Petya. That’s why ransomware tools are so popular now – cyber-criminals just want to return their development costs.

Continue reading →

Vulners.com vulnerability detection plugins for Burp Suite and Google Chrome

5 Replies

What is the main idea of version-based vulnerability detection, especially for Web Applications? With an access to the HTTP response (html, headers, scripts, etc.), you can get the name and version of some standards web application (e.g. CMS, CRM, wiki, task tracker) or names and versions of software components that this web application uses: web server, libraries, frameworks, and so on.

Vulners plugins for Burp Suite Professional and Google Chrome

Next step is to get all known vulnerabilities and exploits  for this software. This is the typical task for Vulners.com – largest database and security content searching system (see “Vulners – Google for hacker“).

So, guys from Vulners Team made a set of useful regular expressions for detecting software names and versions – https://vulners.com/api/v3/burp/rules.  You can use this rules in your own scripts and if you want something that will work out of the box, you can try existing plugins for Burp Suite and Google Chrome.

In this post I would like to show how the detection rules work, present new Vulners Burp API and vulnerability detection plugins for Burp Suite and Google Chrome.

Continue reading →

Exploitability attributes of Nessus plugins: good, bad and Vulners

5 Replies

Exploitability is one of the most important criteria for prioritizing vulnerabilities. Let’s see how good is the exploit-related data of Tenable Nessus NASL plugins and whether we can do it better.

Nessus exploitability

What are the attributes related to exploits? To understand this, I parsed all nasl plugins and got the following results.

Continue reading →

Vulners NASL Plugin Feeds for OpenVAS 9

1 Reply

As I already wrote earlier, you can easily add third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS. So, my friends from Vulners.com realised generation of NASL plugins for OpenVAS using own security content. I’ve tested it for scanning CentOS 7 host. And it works =)

Vulners OpenVAS vulnerabilities

Let’s see the whole process.

Continue reading →

Problems of Vulnerability Prioritization and Detection

5 Replies

It’s the third part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show “Safe Environment” recorded 29.03.2017. In this part we talk about Vulnerability Prioritization and Detection:

  • Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)
  • Environmental factor
  • Manual and  automated vulnerability detection
  • Unauthenticated and authenticated  scanning
  • Why vulnerability scanners are so expensive and why the can’t detect everything

Scanner does not detect all vulnerabilities

Video with manually transcribed Russian/English subtitles:

Prioritization

– Here also the question how to prioritize vulnerabilities properly. Because if you have, as you said, two Linux servers and 20 workstations running Windows, then in principle, you may not need to do prioritization. But if you have fifteen hundred servers: some of them are on perimeter, some are in your DMZ, some are in the internal network. It is still necessary, probably, to understand correctly which vulnerabilities and where should be patched in in the first place.

Yes, this is absolutely true and it’s a very good question. How to prioritize?

Common Vulnerability Scoring System

A natural way. If we look at vulnerabilities with a CVE identifier, for them in the US National Vulnerability Database we can find CVSS Base Score. It is an assessment of vulnerability criticality level.

How is it calculated?

Some person fills the questionnaire: can it be remotely exploited – no, is there public exploit – no, etc.

CVSS framework

The result is a CVSS vector – this is a line in which you can see the main characteristics of this vulnerability and CVSS Base score is the score from 0 to 10 depending on criticality.

This is a natural way of prioritization. But sometimes this method does not give very good results.

Continue reading →