Qualys Security Conference Virtual 2018. New Agents, Patch Management and Free Services. Today I attended a very interesting online event – Qualys Security Conference Virtual 2018. It consisted of 11 webinars, began at 18:00 and will end at 03:45 Moscow time. Not the most convenient timing for Russia, but it was worth it. 🙂
Last time I was at offline QSC event in 2016, so for me it was especially interesting to learn about the new features of Qualys platform.
CISO Forum and the problems of Vulnerability Databases. Last Tuesday, April 24, I was at “CISO FORUM 2020: glance to the future“. I presented there my report “Vulnerability Databases: sifting thousands tons of verbal ore”. In this post, I’ll briefly talk about this report and about the event itself.
My speech was the last in the program. At the same time, in a parallel stream, there was another interesting presentation by the most famous Russian information security blogger. Thus, there was a real danger of speaking in an empty room. 🙂 But everything went well. There were about 30 spectators and we had an active QA session afterwards.
As I wrote earlier, I started preparing my CyberCentral presentation several months before the event. I did not want to tell the same story again at CISO Forum and PHDays. So I prepared 2 different presentations. At CyberCentral, I was talking about Vulnerability Scanners. And at CISO Forum I was talking mainly about Vulnerable Databases. Of course, I reused some materials, but the accents were different.
CyberCentral Summit 2018 in Prague. Almost whole last week I spent in Prague at CyberCentral conference. It was a pretty unique experience for me. I was for the first time at the International conference as a speaker. And not only I presented my report there, but lead the round table on Vulnerability Management and participated in a panel session.
From my point of view, everything was pretty good. I successfully closed my gestalt on public speaking in English. I definitely can do it. 🙂
The event was hold in Lucerna passage right in a center of Prague. Beautiful building in Art Nouveau style with famous ironic “Statue of King Wenceslas Riding an Upside-Down Dead Horse”. 🙂
Even to speak in this building was a great honor. In my opinion the place was chosen ideally. It is beautiful and really good located. Lots of good hotels, restaurants and all main tourist attractions were in nearby. It was easy to go for a walk in a spare time.
Tenable University: Nessus Certificate of Proficiency. Yesterday I finished “Nessus Certificate of Proficiency” learning plan at Tenable University and passed the final test. Here I would like to share my impressions.
First of all, few words about my motivation. I use Nessus literally every day at work. So, it was fun to check my knowledge. I already wrote about Tenable education portal in “Study Vulnerability Assessment in Tenable University for free” post. It’s free. It’s available for everyone on demand. However, Tenable customers get access to way more content.
At this moment there are four learning plan available for Tenable customers: for Nessus, Tenable.io, SecurityCenter and SecurityCenter Continuous View. Each learning plan consist of short video lessons grouped in courses and the final test.
Scaner-VS: Vulnerability Management solution for Russian Military. Scaner-VS is a Vulnerability Assessment system developed by Moscow-based NPO Echelon. It’s pretty popular in Russian government organizations, especially in Russian Army, because it comply all government requirements, has all necessary certificates and is relatively cheap.
As for requirements and certificates, NPO Echelon itself is an important certification authority, so they know how to do the things right. It’s not a secret product or something. You can request trial version freely at http://scaner-vs.ru/version-for-testing/. But note, that it is only available in Russian. I am also sorry, but screenshots in this post will be also in Russian. I will try to do my best to describe them properly.
When you fill the form on Echelon website, you will soon get a link to 3.3 gb .iso file by email. Run it in VirtualBox virtual machine (choose Debian 64 or Debian 32).
Here is a boot menu. Choose first default option.
Some seconds later you will see Linux desktop environment with Scaner-VS web-GUI opened in Firefox.
Problems of Vulnerability Prioritization and Detection. 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:
Video with manually transcribed Russian/English subtitles:
– 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?
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.
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.
Petya, M.E.Doc and the problem of trust. I’ve already mentioned in “Petya the Great and why *they* don’t patch vulnerabilities“, that NotPetya ransomware seems trivial from Vulnerability Management point of view. It uses known Windows vulnerabilities, that were patched by Microsoft long time ago.
Despite of this, I was really interested in M.E.Doc (servers were confiscated by Ukrainian police and website is not operational) role in the initial phase of malware spreading. In my opinion, we have a pretty interesting example of an attack vector, that will be very hard to detect and mitigate. And moreover, it’s once again shows that protected perimeter won’t be a panacea anymore.
M.E.Doc – My Electronic Document Circulation System. “m.e.doc” sounds like the word, that mean “honey” in Russian and Ukrainian. That’s why all these bees in promo materials.
M.E.Doc is an Document Circulation System very popular in Ukraine. It makes possible to send reports to the government authorities in electronic form. It can be used in any organization. I can even imagine situation when usage of this kind of software may be even mandatory. Now the researchers [Eset, Dr.Web] say that M.E.Doc servers sent updates with backdoors to the customers.
This backdoor has abilities:
I don’t really care about technical details about this backdoor. For me it’s enough that malicious code was on official server of the vendor and was spread to legitimate customers. Boom!
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