Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2023: Outlook EoP, MOTW Bypass, Excel DoS, HTTP/3 RCE, ICMP RCE, RPC RCE

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between February and March Patch Tuesdays. Alternative video link for Russia: As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I...

How Debian OVAL content is structured

Hello everyone! As we saw in the last episode, the results of vulnerability detection for one host produced by two different APIs can vary greatly. Therefore, in order to find out the truth, it is necessary to understand what vulnerability data is provided by the Linux distribution vendor and how...

Open Positioner: my new project for tracking IT and security jobs

The idea of my new project is to retrieve the data from job-searching websites and provide better filtering, searching and visualization. I think for the most people who read this, searching for a job in Internet is a pretty common activity. Even if you are not going to change job right now, it...

MIPT/PhysTech guest lecture: Vulnerabilities, Money and People

On December 1, I gave a lecture at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology informally known as PhysTech. This is a very famous and prestigious university in Russia. In Soviet times, it trained personnel for Research Institutes and Experimental Design Bureaus, in particular for the Soviet...

Packabit project: building Nmap deb packages for Ubuntu

During the long New Year holidays 30 dec - 8 jan I started a new project: Vagrant-based Linux package builder called Packabit. I thought it might be nice to have scripts that will automatically build a Linux packages from sources and will NOT litter main system with unnecessary packages. Somethin...

About Elevation of Privilege – Windows Common Log File System Driver (CVE-2025-32701, CVE-2025-32706) vulnerabilities

About Elevation of Privilege - Windows Common Log File System Driver CVE-2025-32701, CVE-2025-32706 vulnerabilities. When Microsoft disclosed these vulnerabilities in the May Patch Tuesday, attackers were already exploiting them in the wild. The Common Log File System CLFS is a general-purpose...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2023: Win Graphics RCE, Edge RCE, Publisher SFB, CLFS EoP, Exchange RCEs, Word RCE, HoloLens1

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between January and February Patch Tuesdays. Alternative video link for Russia: This month I decided to change the format a bit. Now I share my impression of Microsoft...

Making Vulnerable Web-Applications: XXS, RCE, SQL Injection and Stored XSS ( + Buffer Overflow)

In this post I will write some simple vulnerable web applications in python3 and will show how to attack them. This is all for educational purposes and for complete beginners. So please don't be too hard on me. As a first step I will create a basic web-application using twisted python web server...

Accelerating Splunk Dashboards with Base Searches and Saved Searches

Let's say we have a Splunk dashboard with multiple panels. Each panel has its own search request and all of these requests work independently and simultaneously. If they are complex enough, rendering the dashboard may take quite a long time and some panels may even fall by timeout. How to avoid...

PHDays8: Digital Bet and thousands tons of verbal ore

It's time to write about Positive Hack Days 8: Digital Bet conference, which was held May 15-16 at the Moscow World Trade Center. It was the main Russian Information Security event of the first half of 2018. More than 4 thousand people attended! More than 50 reports, master classes and round tabl...

ZeroNights 2017: back to the cyber 80s

Last Friday, 17th of November, I attended the ZeroNights 2017 conference in Moscow. And it was pretty awesome. Thanks to the organizers! Here I would like to share some of my impressions. First of all, I want to say that two main Moscow events for information security practitioners, PHDays and...

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...

November Linux Patch Wednesday

November Linux Patch Wednesday. I was happy in October that the number of vulnerabilities was gradually decreasing to an acceptable level, and in November I got a peak again. A total of 803 vulnerabilities. Of these, 567 are in the Linux Kernel. Kind of crazy. 2 vulnerabilities in Chromium with...

Vulnerability Life Cycle and Vulnerability Disclosures

Vulnerability Life Cycle diagram shows possible states of the vulnerability. In a previous post I suggested to treat vulnerabilities as bugs. Every known vulnerability, as same as every bug, was implemented by some software developer at some moment of time and was fixed at some moment of time...

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...

How to correlate different events in Splunk and make dashboards

Recently I've spent some time dealing with Splunk. Despite the fact that I have already done various Splunk searches before, for example in "Tracking software versions using Nessus and Splunk", the correlation of different events in Splunk seems to be a very different task. And there not so many...

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...

June “In the Trend of VM” (#16): vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Apache HTTP Server, the web interfaces of MDaemon and Zimbra, and the 7-Zip archiver

June "In the Trend of VM" 16: vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Apache HTTP Server, the web interfaces of MDaemon and Zimbra, and the 7-Zip archiver. A traditional monthly vulnerability roundup. Post on Habr rus Digest on the PT website rus A total of 7 trending vulnerabilities: Elevation of...

Barapass console Password Manager

I decided to publish my simple console Password Manager. I called it barapass github. I've been using It for quite some time in Linux and in Windows in WSL. Probably it will also work natively in Windows and MacOS with minimal fixes, but I haven't tried it yet. Why do people use password managers...

Publicly available Tenable .audit scripts

This is most likely a slowpoke news, but I just found out that Tenable .audit files with formalized Compliance Management checks are publicly available and can be downloaded without any registration. However, you must accept the looooong license agreement. So, I have two completely theoretical!...

May Microsoft Patch Tuesday

May Microsoft Patch Tuesday. A total of 119 vulnerabilities, approximately 1.5 times fewer than in April. There are currently no vulnerabilities marked as actively exploited in the wild. However, there is one vulnerability with a public exploit: 🔸 EoP - Windows Kernel CVE-2026-40369. A detailed...

February 2024: Vulremi, Vuldetta, PT VM Course relaunch, PT TrendVulns digests, Ivanti, Fortinet, MSPT, Linux PW

February 2024: Vulremi, Vuldetta, PT VM Course relaunch, PT TrendVulns digests, Ivanti, Fortinet, MSPT, Linux PW. Hello everyone! In this episode, I will talk about the February updates of my open source projects, also about projects at my main job at Positive Technologies and interesting...

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...

What I expect from IT Asset Inventory

The main problem of vulnerability management, in my opinion, is that it is not always clear whether we know about ALL network hosts existing in our infrastructure or not. So, not the actual process of scanning and the detection of vulnerabilities, but the lack of knowledge what we should scan...

Vulnerability Management news and publications #1

Hello everyone! In this episode, I will try to revive Security News with a focus on Vulnerability Management. On the one hand, creating such reviews requires free time, which could be spent more wisely, for example, on open source projects or original research. On the other hand, there are...

AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference Part 1: Full video in Russian + Timecodes in English

Hello all! 2 weeks ago I participated in the best online event fully dedicated to Vulnerability Management in Russia. It was super fun and exciting. Thanks to all the colleagues and especially to Lev Paley for the great moderation! I have talked out completely. Everything I wanted and the way I...

Outpost24 Appsec Scale for Web Application Scanning

Today I would like to write about yet another Outpost24 product - cloud Web Application Scanner Appsec Scale. It is available in the same interface as Outpost24 Outscan, that I reviewed earlier. Select APPSEC SCALE in the start menu and you can scan web applications: New application If you don't...

No left boundary for Vulnerability Detection

It's another common problem in nearly all Vulnerability Management products. In the post "What’s wrong with patch-based Vulnerability Management checks?" I wrote about the issues in plugin descriptions, now let's see what can go wrong with the detection logic. The problem is that Vulnerability...

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...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2023: CLFS EoP, Word RCE, MSMQ QueueJumper RCE, PCL6, DNS, DHCP

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2023: CLFS EoP, Word RCE, MSMQ QueueJumper RCE, PCL6, DNS, DHCP. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between March and April Patch Tuesdays. Alternative video link for Russia:...

Rapid7 Nexpose in 2017

Last year I tested Rapid7 Nexpose and wrote two posts about installation and use of Nexpose Community Edition and Nexpose API. I didn't follow news of this vendor for a about year. Today I watched live demo of Nexpose latest version. It has some new interesting features, improvements and ideas,...

The most magnificent thing about Vulnerabilities and who is behind the magic

What I like the most about software vulnerabilities is how "vulnerability", as a quality of a real object and the computer program is real, literally appears from nothing. Let's say we have a fully updated server. We turn it off, lock it in a safe and forget about it for half a year. Six months...

November 2023 – January 2024: New Vulristics Features, 3 Months of Microsoft Patch Tuesdays and Linux Patch Wednesdays, Year 2023 in Review

November 2023 – January 2024: New Vulristics Features, 3 Months of Microsoft Patch Tuesdays and Linux Patch Wednesdays, Year 2023 in Review. Hello everyone! It has been 3 months since the last episode. I spent most of this time improving my Vulristics project. So in this episode, let’s take a loo...

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 i...

Last Week’s Security News: Black Hat Pwnie Awards, iPhone Checks Photos, Evil Windows Print Server, Cisco VPN Routers Takeovers

Hello everyone! Last Weeks Security News, August 1 - August 8. Black Hat Pwnie Awards Last week was more quiet than normal with Black Hat USA and DEF CON security conferences. I would like to start with the Pwnie Awards, which are held annually at Black Hat. Its like an Oscar or Tony in the...

VB-Trend 2018 Splunk Conference

Today I attended VB-Trend 2018 Splunk conference organized by system integrator VolgaBlob. Video fragments from the event: Comparing to "Splunk Discovery Day", the conference was much smaller less than 100 people, focused on technical aspects, Information Security and informal communication. And...

ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2017

Last Thursday, I attended a very interesting event entirely dedicated to Vulnerability Management - open ISACA Moscow meetup. Me and my former colleague from Mail.Ru Group Dmitry Chernobaj presented there our joint report "Enterprise Vulnerability Management: fancy marketing brochures and the...

About Elevation of Privilege – Windows Common Log File System Driver (CVE-2025-29824) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - Windows Common Log File System Driver CVE-2025-29824 vulnerability. The vulnerability from the April Microsoft Patch Tuesday allows an attacker operating under a regular user account to escalate their privileges to SYSTEM level. According to Microsoft, the...

Nessus Essentials with offline registration and plugin updates

In this episode, I would like to talk about Nessus Essentials and, in particular, how to register and update it without direct internet access. Nothing complicated, but there are a couple of pitfalls that I would like to share. Lets say you need to scan a host in a critical autonomous segment whe...

Tenable IO WAS Chrome Extension

In the comments of the previous post about Tenable IO WAS Fergus Cooney mentioned a new Google Chrome extension for Tenable IO WAS, that should help in configuring scan Authentication setting. You can install it in Chrome Web Store. The idea is great. Authentication process in modern web...

Can a Vulnerability Scan break servers and services?

The most serious problem of Vulnerability Scanners is that they are too complex and unpredictable. Usually they don't affect the target hosts, but when they do, welcome to hell! And if you scan huge infrastructure, tens thousands hosts and more, it's not "if" the scanner will break the server it'...

Starting/stopping Amazon EC2 instances using CLI and Python SDK

It's a very good practice to scan your perimeter from the outside of your network, simulating an attacker. However, you will need to deploy the scanners somewhere to do this. Hosting on Amazon EC2 can be a good and cost-effective option, especially if you start instances with vulnerability scanne...

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: The Latest Versions of Antivirus Engine & Signatures

In a previous episode on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, I described how to get a list of antivirus engine and signatures versions for the hosts in your infrastructure using the Microsoft Graph API. But the problem remains. You know the versions that are currently installed on the hosts. But whe...

U.S. sanctions against Russian cybersecurity companies

I never thought that I will write here about state sanctions. Usually I try to ignore political topics. But now it's necessary. Yesterday OFAC introduced sanctions against 5 Russian companies. I would like to mention 3 of them: Digital Security - one of the leading Russian Information Security...

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...

Vulners Linux Audit API: Security Bulletin Publication Dates in Results

Hello everyone! In this short episode, I want to talk about the new feature in Vulners Linux API. Alternative video link for Russia: Linux security bulletin publication dates are now included in scan results. Why is it useful? A few words why this Linux Audit API is needed. You collect a list of...

Vulnerability subscriptions in terms of business

The question is: do we really need an employee in organization that deals with vulnerabilities in infrastructure on a full-time basis? Since this is similar to what I do for living, I would naturally say that yes, it is necessary. But as person, who makes security automation, I can say that there...

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...

Who should protect you from Cyber Threats?

The world is becoming increasingly dependent on information technologies. 1. Government. More and more states provide digital services for their citizens and rely complex information systems. 2. Business. There are no more companies that do not have IT infrastructure on-premises or cloud. IT...

CyberThursday: Asset Inventory, IT-transformation in Cisco, Pentest vs. RedTeam

Two weeks ago I was speaking at a very interesting information security event - CyberThursday. This is a meeting of a closed Information Security practitioners group. The group is about 70 people, mainly from the financial organizations, telecoms and security vendors. These meetings have a rather...