PHDays 11: towards the Independence Era

Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about the Positive Hack Days 11 conference, which took place on May 18 and 19 in Moscow. As usual, I want to express my personal opinion about this event. Alternative video link for Russia: As I did last year, I want to start talking about this...

Kenna Security: Connectors and REST API

In the last post about Kenna Security cloud service I mentioned their main features for analyzing data from different vulnerability scanners. Now let's see how to import Tenable Nessus scan results in Kenna. Here you can see the list of connectors for all supported products: Three connectors for...

Gitlab OmniAuth Static Passwords and stored XSS

Hello everyone! In this episode, lets take a look at the latest vulnerabilities in Gitlab. On March 31, the Critical Security Release for GitLab Community Edition CE and Enterprise Edition EE was released. GitLab recommends that all installations running a version affected by the issues described...

Managing JIRA Scrum Sprints using API

Atlassian Jira is a great tool for organizing Agile processes, especially Scrum. But managing Scrum Sprints manually using Jira web GUI maybe time consuming and annoying. So, I decided to automate some routine operations using JIRA API and Python. The API calls are described on the official page ...

Joint Advisory AA22-279A and Vulristics

Hello everyone! This episode will be about the new hot twenty vulnerabilities from CISA, NSA and FBI, Joint cybersecurity advisory CSA AA22-279A, and how I analyzed these vulnerabilities using my open source project Vulristics. Alternative video link for Russia: Americans cant just release a list...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2020: my classification script, confusing RCE in Adobe Type Manager and updates for older vulnerabilities

Easiest task ever? 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...

November Linux Patch Wednesday

NovemberLinux Patch Wednesday. In November, Linux vendors began fixing 516 vulnerabilities, one and a half times fewer than in October. Of these, 232 are in the Linux Kernel. One vulnerability is exploited in the wild: MemCor - Chromium CVE-2025-13223. Added to CISA KEV on November 19. For 64 mor...

Vulristics News: EPSS v3 Support, Integration into Cloud Advisor

Vulristics News: EPSS v3 Support, Integration into Cloud Advisor. 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-149273431456239122 EPSS v3 The third...

Big Microsoft day: EOL for Win7, Win2008 and crypt32.dll

Big Microsoft day. End-of-life for Windows 7 desktops and Windows 2008 servers strictly speaking Windows Server 2008 R2. I think that today many security guys had a fun task to count how many host hosts with win7 and win2008 they still have in the organization. So, Asset Management is a necessity...

MaxPatrol 8 installation process

Today I have a great opportunity to write about MaxPatrol 8. For me it is a very nostalgic experience. I worked for many year in Positive Technologies developing this product. And now I can write about it from the customer side. MaxPatrol is still not very well known outside Russia and CIS,...

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: Common Vulnerability Scoring System CVSS Environmental factor Manual and automated vulnerability detection...

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...

Exploitability attributes of Nessus plugins: good, bad and Vulners

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

PHDays VII: To Vulnerability Database and beyond

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, May 23-24, I attended PHDays VII conference in Moscow. I was talking there about vulnerability databases and the evolution process of vulnerability assessment tools, as far as I understand it. But first of all, a few words about the conference itself. I can tell that...

April Microsoft Patch Tuesday

April Microsoft Patch Tuesday. A total of 153 vulnerabilities, 2 times more than in March. Of these, 32 were added between the March and April MSPTs. Three vulnerabilities show signs of exploitation in the wild: EoP - Windows Common Log File System Driver CVE-2025-29824. An attacker can gain SYST...

A few words about Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing” 2018

February and March are the hot months for marketing reports. I already wrote about IDC and Forrester reports about Vulnerability Management-related markets. And this Monday, March 19, Gartner released new "Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing". You can buy it on the official website fo...

Retrieving data from Splunk Dashboard Panels via API

Fist of all, why might someone want to get data from the panels of a dashboard in Splunk? Why it might be useful? Well, if the script can process everything that human analyst sees on a Splunk dashboard, all the automation comes very natural. You just figure out what routine operations the analys...

Potential RCE in Nessus 7 and attacks on Vulnerability Scanners

A few days ago I saw an interesting youtube video UPD. 14.05.18 Not available anymore in my Facebook feed. It is demonstrating the exploitation of the RCE vulnerability in Tenable Nessus Professional 7.0.3. Currently we have very few information about this vulnerability: only youtube video, which...

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...

getsploit from Vulners.com

Kirill Isox Ermakov, the founder of Vulners, has recently presented a new open-source tool for searching and downloading exploits - getsploit. Let's say we want to pentest some WordPress blog. For example, this website avleonov.com. We can get WordPress version simply using curl: $ curl -s...

Dante SOCKS5 server with authentication

It's not so obvious that socks servers with authentication are a necessary thing. 1. You can run a "local socks service" simply by connecting to a remote host via ssh with -D 2. Most of software products, that support socks, don't support socks servers with authentication The last fact I find ver...

What’s new in Nessus 8

Today Tenable released a new version of their famous vulnerability scanner - Nessus 8. The existing scanner nodes don't see the updates yet, but the installation binaries are already available. So you may try to install it. This major release will be way more positive than the previous one. Of...

Vulchain scan workflow and search queries

This post will be about my Vulnerability Scanner project - Vulchain. Recently I've spent couple of my weekends almost exclusively on coding: refactoring the scan engine, creating API and GUI. I was doing it because of the conferences, where I will be speaking soon: April 11-13 CyberCentral in...

Outpost24 OUTSCAN for detecting vulnerabilities on your network perimeter

Today I would like to write a post about Outpost24. This company was founded in 2001. For comparison, Tenable was founded in 2002 and Qualys in 1999. So, it's a company with a pretty long history. Outpost24 make Vulnerability Management & Web Application Security products and provide various...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday October 2022: Exchange ProxyNotShell RCE, Windows COM+ EoP, AD EoP, Azure Arc Kubernetes EoP

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for October 2022, including vulnerabilities that were added between September and October Patch Tuesdays. As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to create the report. Alternative video link for Russia: $ cat...

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

Microsoft Patch Tuesday July 2023: Vulristics improvements, Office RCE, SFB SmartScreen and Outlook, EoP MSHTML and ERS, other RCEs. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for July 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between June and July Patch Tuesdays...

About Remote Code Execution – FortiManager “FortiJump” (CVE-2024-47575) vulnerability

About Remote Code Execution - FortiManager "FortiJump" CVE-2024-47575 vulnerability. FortiManager is a centralized solution for configuring, enforcing policies, updating, and monitoring Fortinet network devices. The vulnerability was released on October 23. A missing authentication for critical...

How to get the Organization Units (OU) and Hosts from Microsoft Active Directory using Python ldap3

I recently figured out how to work with Microsoft Active Directory using Python 3. I wanted to get a hierarchy of Organizational Units OUs and all the network hosts associated with these OUs to search for possible anomalies. If you are not familiar with AD, here is a good thread about the...

Automating Opera browser with Selenium WebDriver and Python

The right way to automate a web application is, certainly, to understand how this application works, by using burp see "Burp Suite Free Edition and NTLM authentication in ASP.net applications" for example, retrieve all necessary requests and learn how to use them. However, this is sometimes so...

The severity of the Elevation of Privilege – Windows Kernel-Mode Driver (CVE-2024-35250) vulnerability has increased

The severity of the Elevation of Privilege - Windows Kernel-Mode Driver CVE-2024-35250 vulnerability has increased. This vulnerability was fixed as part of the June Microsoft Patch Tuesday. As in the case of the CVE-2024-30090 vulnerability, it was discovered by a researcher with the nickname...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday December 2021

Hello everyone! Its even strange to talk about other vulnerabilities, while everyone is so focused on vulnerabilities in log4j. But life doesnt stop. Other vulnerabilities appear every day. And of course, there are many critical ones among them that require immediate patching. This episode will b...

ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2018

Last Thursday, September 20th, I spoke at ISACA Moscow "Vulnerability Management" Meetup held at Polytechnic University. The only event in Moscow devoted solely to Vulnerability Management. So I just had to take part in it. The target audience of the event - people who implement the vulnerability...

New National Vulnerability Database visualizations and feeds

Recently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST introduced a new version of National Vulnerability Database NVD website.  I will not say that I liked this redesign: IMHO, old website with US flag was much prettier and useful: But the very fact that the site is developing, I...

July “In the Trend of VM” (#17): vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and Roundcube

July "In the Trend of VM" 17: vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and Roundcube. A traditional monthly roundup. This time, it's a very short one. Post on Habr rus Digest on the PT website rus Only three trending vulnerabilities: Remote Code Execution - Internet Shortcut Files CVE-2025-33053...

How to get Antivirus-related Data from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint using Intune and Graph API

Hello everyone! In this episode, I would like to tell you how I tried to get automatically antivirus-related data current status, engine and signature version, last full scan date from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint using Microsoft Intune and the Graph API. Why is this necessary? You might assum...

Why Asset Management is so important for Vulnerability Management and Infrastructure Security?

When people ask me how should they start building Vulnerability Management process in their organization well, sometimes it happens, I advice them to create an effective Asset Management process first. Because it's the foundation of the whole Infrastructure Security. The term "Asset Management" h...

What’s new in Gartner WAF Magic Quadrant 2017?

To tell the truth, I was not much interested in Web Application Firewall market since the time when I was doing competitive analysis in Positive Technologies. And a few days ago Gartner published a fresh WAF research with interesting Magic Quadrants. I decided to figure out what's new there. Here...

How to make Email Bot service in Python

First of all, why you may want to use such service? Despite the fact that currently there are so many different channels of communication including various messaging apps, Email is still a default and universal way to do it. Literally every enterprise service supports email notifications, even if...

Sending FireEye HX data to Splunk

FireEye HX is an agent-based Endpoint Protection solution. Something like an antivirus, but focused on Advanced Persistent Threats APT. It has an appliance with GUI where you can manage the agents and see information about detected security incidents. As with any agent-based solution, it's...

Carbon Blacking your sensitive data it’s what the agents normally do

But usually without such consequences. In this situation with Carbon Black, I am most interested in the actual reasons of all this media noise. From what point business as usual becomes a scandal. Ok, when you see Carbon Black customer's private files in public access at Virus Total it's a 100%...

Creating Splunk Alerts using API

As I mentioned in "Accelerating Splunk Dashboards with Base Searches and Saved Searches", Splunk Reports are basically the Saved Searches. Moreover, Splunk Alerts are also the same Saved Searches with some additional parameters. The question is what parameters you need to set to get the right...

What’s inside Vulners.com database and when were security objects updated last time

As I already wrote earlier, the main advantage of Vulners.com, in my opinion, is openness. An open system allows you to look under the hood, make sure that everything works fine and ask developers uncomfortable questions why there were no updates for a long time for some types of security objects...

New episode “In The Trend of VM” (#11): vulnerabilities that became trending in December and the final report on trending vulnerabilities for 2024

New episode "In The Trend of VM" 11: vulnerabilities that became trending in December and the final report on trending vulnerabilities for 2024. I made this episode exclusively for the Telegram channel @avleonovcom "Vulnerability Management and More". Video on YouTube, LinkedIn Post on Habr rus...

SSH, SFTP, public key authentication and python

SFTP is a simple and fairly reliable way to share the information within the organization. Let's look at the situation when you need to pick up some files from a remote host with authorization by public key. And after that, let's see how to use it with in python. Moreover, let's see how to work...

SOC Forum 2017: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Massive Malware Attacks

Today I spoke at SOC Forum 2017 in Moscow. It was a great large-scale event about Security Operation Centers. 2,700 people registered. Lots of people in suits . And lots of my good fellows. The event was held in Radisson Royal Congress Park. There were three large halls for presentations and a hu...

New episode “In the Trend of VM” (#12): 8 February CVEs & Why the Darknet Matters for VM Specialists

New episode "In the Trend of VM" 12: 8 February CVEs & Why the Darknet Matters for VM Specialists. Now with a new design and new video editing. Video on YouTube and LinkedIn Post on Habr rus Digest on the PT website Content: 00:00 Greetings 00:23 Remote Code Execution - Windows Lightweight...

January Microsoft Patch Tuesday

January Microsoft Patch Tuesday. 170 CVEs, 10 of them were added since December MSPT. 3 exploited in the wild: EoP - Windows Hyper-V NT Kernel Integration VSP CVE-2025-21333, CVE-2025-21334, CVE-2025-21335. No details yet. No vulnerabilities have public exploits. 5 have private ones: Security...

About Elevation of Privilege – Windows Task Scheduler (CVE-2024-49039) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - Windows Task Scheduler CVE-2024-49039 vulnerability. It was released on November Microsoft Patch Tuesday and showed signs of exploitation in the wild right away. To exploit the vulnerability, an authenticated attacker runs a specially crafted application on the targ...

CISO Forum 2019: Vulnerability Management, Red Teaming and a career in Information Security abroad

Today, at the very end of 2019, I want to write about the event I attended in April. Sorry for the delay . This doesn't mean that CISO Forum 2019 was not Interesting or I had nothing to share. Not at all! In fact, it was the most inspiring event of the year, and I wanted to make a truly monumenta...

Dealing with cybersquatting, typosquatting and phishing

It won't be a secret to say that phishing remains one of the most effective attack vectors. For example, your colleague receives by email a malicious web link that looks like a link to your corporate portal and opens it. If your Vulnerability and Patch Management programs are not good enough see...