Last Week’s Security news: Pegasus, SeriousSAM, Sequoia. Hello everyone! After 4 episodes of the Last Week’s Security news, I decided to change the format. I will no longer try to cover all the important news, because it takes a long time to prepare such reviews. So, from now on, I will focus only on a few news of the past week, which I subjectively consider the most interesting.
So, the last week, July 19 – July 25. In my opinion, the most interesting news was the scandal related to the iPhone Pegasus spyware and two Elevations of Privileges: SeriousSAM for Windows and Sequoia for Linux.
Vulristics Microsoft Patch Tuesday July 2021: Zero-days EoP in Kernel and RCE in Scripting Engine, RCEs in Kernel, DNS Server, Exchange and Hyper-V. Hello everyone! For the past 9 months, I’ve been doing Microsoft Patch Tuesday reviews quarterly. Now I think it would be better to review the July Patch Tuesday while the topic is still fresh. And that will save us some time in the next Last Week’s Security news episode. So, July Patch Tuesday, 116 vulnerabilities.
The 2 most critical are the Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-31979, CVE-2021-33771). These vulnerabilities are critical because they are used in real attacks according to Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center and Security Response Center. Tenable: “A local, authenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to run processes with elevated permissions. Similar zero-day vulnerabilities were patched in April 2020, which were observed under active exploitation by Google Project Zero.”
Getting Hosts from Microsoft Intune MDM using Python. Today I want to talk about Microsoft Intune. It is a Mobile Device Management platform.
Well, I think that the importance of MDM systems has become much higher than it was before the days of covid-19. Simply because a lot more people now work remotely using corporate laptops. And if these people don’t connect to the corporate network using a VPN, you most likely won’t see any activity from their devices in Active Directory. This means that you will not understand whether the device is active or not. And it will be impossible to get the correct security metrics for these devices.
Mobile device management is a solution to this problem as it maintains a connection between the laptop and the cloud server. MDM can collect various parameters from hosts, but for me the most important parameter is the timestamp. I will not describe all the features of Microsoft Intune here. Simply because at this stage they are not very interesting to me. The task I needed to solve was how to get the timestamp of the last activity for all hosts in Microsoft Intune using the official API. And since this is poorly documented, I want to share it with you.
Vulristics: Beyond Microsoft Patch Tuesdays, Analyzing Arbitrary CVEs. Hello everyone! In this episode I would like to share an update for my Vulristics project.
For those who don’t know, in this project I am working on an alternative vulnerability scoring based on publicly available data to highlight vulnerabilities that need to be fixed as soon as possible. Roughly speaking, this is something like Tenable VPR, but more transparent and even open source. Currently it works with much less data sources. It mainly depends on the type of vulnerability, the prevalence of vulnerable software, public exploits and exploitation in the wild.
I started with Microsoft PatchTuesday Vulnerabilities because Microsoft provides much better data than other vendors. They have the type of vulnerability and the name of the vulnerable software in the title.
But it’s time to go further and now you can use Vulristics to analyze any set of CVEs. I changed the scirpts that were closely related to the Microsoft datasource and added new features to get the type of vulnerability and name of the software from the CVE description.
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.
Add new features to Notepad++ using Python scripts: keyboard shortcut to insert current time. I have to say, I spend a lot of time daily in Notepad++ text editor for Windows. I keep my “logbook” there. I record what I am doing now and what needs to be done. This allows me not to keep everything in my head and switch the context more efficiently. I can recommend this to everyone. And it is especially useful to note when you started working on a task and when you finished. This gives an understanding of what actually takes your time. I’m not a fan of very strict and formal techniques such as pomodoro, but using some form of time management is good.
Recording timestamps manually is inconvenient. It would be much easier to press a key combination and automatically insert the current timestamp into the document. It turned out that this is possible, and even more – you can get the results of any Python script this way!
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?
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.
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![Elevation of Privilege - Sudo (CVE-2021-3156) - High [595]](https://avleonov.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-2.png)
