Tag Archives: Vulristics

October 2023: back to Positive Technologies, Vulristics updates, Linux Patch Wednesday, Microsoft Patch Tuesday, PhysTech VM lecture

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Hello everyone! October was an interesting and busy month for me. I started a new job, worked on my open source Vulristics project, and analyzed vulnerabilities using it. Especially Linux vulnerabilities as part of my new Linux Patch Wednesday project. And, of course, analyzed Microsoft Patch Tuesday as well. In addition, at the end of October I was a guest lecturer at MIPT/PhysTech university. But first thing first.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239138

Back to Positive Technologies

back to Positive Technologies
back to Positive Technologies

On October 3, I joined the Positive Technologies team. There I will work on developing Vulnerability Management practices. I have already worked at PT for 6 years, from June 2009 to October 2015. And now, exactly 8 years later, I’m here again. I feel very pleasant emotions about this and have many plans. 🤩 I am sure that in the PT team I will be able to implement many cool things for the development of Vulnerability Management in Russia and abroad. 🙂

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September 2023: VM courses, Bahasa Indonesia, Russian Podcasts, Goodbye Tinkoff, MS Patch Tuesday, Qualys TOP 20, Linux, Forrester, GigaOm, R-Vision VM

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Hello everyone! On the last day of September, I decided to record another retrospective episode on how my Vulnerability Management month went.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239136

September was quite a busy month for me.

Vulnerability Management courses

I participated in two educational activities. The first one is an on-line cyber security course for my alma mater, Bauman Moscow State Technical University.

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August 2023: GitHub PoCs, Vulristics, Qualys First-Party, Tenable ExposureAI, SC Awards and Rapid7, Anglo-Saxon list, MS Patch Tuesday, WinRAR, Juniper

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Hello everyone! This month I decided NOT to make an episode completely dedicated to Microsoft Patch Tuesday. Instead, this episode will be an answer to the question of how my Vulnerability Management month went. A retrospection of some kind.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239134

GitHub exploits and Vulristics

This month I made some improvements to my Vulristics vulnerability prioritization tool. These changes relate to the use of exploit data on Github. We all know that exploits are often posted on GitHub. But how adequate is this source in order to evaluate the exploitability?

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

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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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Vulristics News: EPSS v3 Support, Integration into Cloud Advisor

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Hello everyone! This episode will focus on the news from my open source Vulristics project for vulnerability analysis and prioritization.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239122

EPSS v3

The third iteration of the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) was released in March. It is stated that EPSS has become 82% better. There is a pretty cool and detailed article about the changes. For example, EPSS Team began to analyze not 16 parameters of vulnerabilities, but 1164. I have a suspicion that most of these properties are vendor labels, as in the table.

But trying to figure out how it actually works is not very promising. After all, this is the output of some neural network. So there is no algorithm there. In terms of complexity and incomprehensibility, this is already similar to Tenable VPR. But the fact that EPSS is available for free redeems everything. 😇 By the way, the article mentions Tenable VPR and other commercial scores and criticizes them for their proprietary nature, public inaccessibility, and the fact that these scores are partly based on expert opinion, and not just on data.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday January 2023: ALPC EoP, Win Backup EoP, LocalPotato, Exchange, Remote RCEs

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

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239115

As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I took the comments about the vulnerabilities from the Qualys, Nessus, Rapid7 and ZDI Patch Tuesday reviews.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday December 2022: SPNEGO RCE, Mark of the Web Bypass, Edge Memory Corruptions

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for December 2022, including vulnerabilities that were added between November and December Patch Tuesdays. As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239112

But let’s start with an older vulnerability. This will be another example why vulnerability prioritization is a tricky thing and you should patch everything. In the September Microsoft Patch Tuesday there was a vulnerability Information Disclosure – SPNEGO Extended Negotiation (NEGOEX) Security Mechanism (CVE-2022-37958), which was completely unnoticed by everyone. Not a single VM vendor paid attention to it in their reviews. I didn’t pay attention either.

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