Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2022. Hello everyone! I am glad to greet you from the most sanctioned country in the world. Despite all the difficulties, we carry on. I even have some time to release new episodes. This time it will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2022.
I do the analysis as usual with my open source tool Vulristics. You can still download it on github. I hope that github won’t block Russian repositories and accounts, but for now it looks possible. Most likely, I will just start hosting the sources of my projects on avleonov.com in this case. Or on another domain, if it gets even tougher. Stay tuned.
VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners. Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf22 Vulnerability Management conference. I want to talk about the blind spots in the knowledge bases of Vulnerability Scanners and Vulnerability Management products.
This report was presented in Russian at Tenable Security Day 2022. The video is here.
Potential customers rarely worry about the completeness of the Knowledge Base when choosing a Vulnerability Scanner. They usually trust the VM vendors’ claims of the “largest vulnerability base” and the total number of detection plugins. But in fact the completeness is very important. All high-level vulnerability prioritization features are meaningless unless the vulnerability has been reliably detected. In this presentation, I will show the examples of blindspots in the knowledge bases of vulnerability management products, try to describe the causes and what we (as customers and the community) can do about it.
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:
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.
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).
It’s nice that various areas related to Vulnerability Management have been mentioned: Pentest, Bug Bounty, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS).
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.
Vulristics HTML Report Update: Table for Products, Table for Vuln. Types and “Prevalence”. Hi guys! I was on vacation this week. So I had time to work on my Vulristics project. For those who don’t know, this is a framework for prioritizing known CVE vulnerabilities. I was mainly grooming the HTML report.
I added a logo at the top, set a max width for the report, added a timestamp when the report was created so you can now see how fresh it is. I have combined CVSS and Vulristics score statistics in two parallel columns.
But the main new feature is the tables of vulnerable products and types of vulnerabilities. The products are sorted by “prevalence”. You can review this list and ask yourself if this order is correct in your opinion or change the “prevalence” values for some products in the config dictionary. For software products with unknown “prevalence”, you will see the comment “Unclassified Product”.
PHDays 10: U.S. Sanctions, My Talk on Vulristics, Other Great Talks Related to VM. Today I will talk about the Positive Hack Days conference, which took place on May 20 and May 21 in Moscow. I can say that this was and remains the main event for Information Security Practitioners in Russia.
First of all, I have to say a few words about the sanctions. The organizer of the event, Positive Technologies, is under the sanctions of the US Treasury Department since April 2021 among the “COMPANIES IN THE TECHNOLOGY SECTOR SUPPORTING RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES”. In a press release, the Treasury Department wrote that Positive Technologies hosts large-scale conventions that are used as recruiting events for russian special services. Well, I don’t know exactly what they mean. Maybe they mean PHDays or maybe not. But to say this about PHDays is like saying that any major international conference, Black Hat or RSA, is a recruiting event. This is ridiculous. In my humble opinion, these are some dirty political games. It is sad that reputable information security companies and security researchers are suffering from this.
Now let’s talk about my speech at PHDays 10. This year I had the opportunity to talk for an hour about my pet project – Vulristics. This project can help you prioritize known vulnerabilities. Anything that has a CVE id. There is a full video of my speech. I have uploaded this to my YouTube channel.
Russian version.
And a version that was dubbed into English.
So, if you’re interested, I recommend watching the full video. Here I will simply repeat the main points.
AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 2: What was I talking about there. Hello all! It is the second part about AM Live Vulnerability Management conference. In the first part I made the timecodes for the 2 hours video in Russian. Here I have combined all my lines into one text.
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability Management process is the opposite of the admin’s saying “If it works – don’t touch it!”. The main idea of this process is to somehow fix the vulnerabilities. How do you achieve this is not so important. Maybe you will have a nice Plan-Do-Check-Act process and strict policies. Maybe not. The main thing is that you fix vulnerabilities! And the main problem is to negotiate this regular patching with system administrators and service owners.
Vulristics: Microsoft Patch Tuesdays Q1 2021. Hello everyone! It has been 3 months since my last review of Microsoft vulnerabilities for Q4 2020. In this episode I want to review the Microsoft vulnerabilities for the first quarter of 2021. There will be 4 parts: January, February, March and the vulnerabilities that were released between the Patch Tuesdays.
I will be using the reports that I created with my Vulristics tool. This time I’ll try to make the episodes shorter. I will describe only the most critical vulnerabilities. Links to the full reports are at the bottom of the blog post.
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