Processing .docx and .xlsx files with Python

MS Office documents are probably one of the most inconvenient and poorly formalized data sources. It's much better to keep all the data in specialized databases or at least in wiki. But in real life, MS Office documents are in active use in nearly every organization. Simply because it is a flexib...

Psychological Aspects of Vulnerability Remediation

In my opinion, Remediation is the most difficult part of Vulnerability Management process. If you know the assets in your organization and can assess them, you will sooner or later produce a good enough flow of critical vulnerabilities. But what the point, if the IT team will not fix them?...

Free High-Tech Bridge ImmuniWeb Application Discovery service

Today I would like to talk about another service for application security analysis by High-Tech Bridge. It's called ImmuniWeb Application Discovery. This service can get information about your web and mobile applications available from the Internet. Believe me, this is not so obvious for a large...

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...

Career Navigator talk for IT Hub College

Last week I gave a "Career Navigator" talk for the students of the IT Hub College in Moscow. By the way, this college has a very interesting practical information security program. If it is relevant for you, check it out. Ive never talked so much about myself in public. It was like giving advises...

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...

Asset Inventory for Internal Network: problems with Active Scanning and advantages of Splunk

In the previous post, I was writing about Asset Inventory and Vulnerability Scanning on the Network Perimeter. Now it's time to write about the Internal Network. I see a typical IT-infrastructure of a large organization as monstrous favela, like Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. At the beginning ...

Splunk Discovery Day Moscow 2018

Today I attended the Splunk Discovery Day 2018 conference. It is something like a local equivalent of the famous Splunk .conf. More than 200 people have registered. The event was held in the luxury Baltschug Kempinski hotel in the very center of Moscow with a beautiful view of the Red Square and...

Making Expect scripts for SSH Authentication and Privilege Elevation

Expect can help you to automate interactive console applications. For example, expect script can go to some Linux host via SSH with password authentication, make additional authentication procedures su, sudo to elevate privileges and execute some commands. Like Vulnerability and Compliance...

First steps with Docker: installation in CentOS 7, vulnerability assessment, interactive mode and saving changes

Docker and containerization are literally everywhere. IMHO, this changes the IT landscape much more than virtualization and clouds. Let's say you have a host, you checked it and find out that there are no vulnerable packages. But what's the point if this host runs Docker containers with their own...

Sending tables from Atlassian Confluence to Splunk

Sometimes when we make automated analysis with Splunk, it might be necessary to use information that was entered or edited manually. For example, the classification of network hosts: do they belong to the PCI-DSS Scope or another group critical hosts or not. In this case, Confluence can be quite ...

Great OpenVAS news: delay in plugin feed will be dropped, new GVM-Tools for remote management released

Jan Oliver Wagner, CEO of Greenbone and OpenVAS Community leader sent recently several messages to community email list with the great news. First of all, Greenbone decided to drop two weeks delay in a free plugin feed, that was implemented in June 2017 and made some OpenVAS users pretty nervous....

Forrester report for Rapid7: number juggling and an excellent overview of Vulnerability Management problems

I recently read Forrester's 20-page report "The Total Economic Impact Of Rapid7 InsightVM". It is about the Cost Savings And Business Benefits that Vulnerability Management solution can bring to the organizations. In short, I didn't like everything related to money. It seems like juggling with...

About Remote Code Execution – Windows Shell (CVE-2026-21510) vulnerability

About Remote Code Execution - Windows Shell CVE-2026-21510 vulnerability. A vulnerability from the February Microsoft Patch Tuesday. The Windows Shell is the primary interface through which users interact with the Windows operating system. It includes visible elements such as the Desktop, Taskbar...

AVLEONOV Podcast

I finally launched my own podcast. These are the audio tracks from my videos with some minimal changes, but it may be more convenient for someone to follow me this way. You can try to find my podcast in your podcast player by searching for "avleonov" well, at least it works in Podcast Addict or a...

Tracking changes in CERT bulletins and Nessus plugins using Vulners Time Machine

If you use Vulners.com vulnerability search engine, you probably know that it has a real "Time Machine". Each time Vulners sees some changes on a source page it creates a new version of security object. And you can see the full history of changes in a nice GUI: In most cases, the vendor just...

Masking Vulnerability Scan reports

Continuing the series of posts about Kenna "Analyzing Vulnerability Scan data", "Connectors and REST API" and similar services. Is it actually safe to send your vulnerability data to some external cloud service for analysis? Leakage of such information can potentially cause great damage to your...

My comments on Forrester’s “Vulnerability Management vendor landscape 2017”

A top consulting company, Forrester Research, recently published report "Vendor Landscape: Vulnerability Management, 2017". You can read for free by filling a small form on Tenable web site. What's interesting in this document? First of all, Josh Zelonis and co-authors presented their version of ...

Crypto AG scandal

The article in The Washington Post is really huge, but even a brief glance is enough to see how absolutely amazing this Crypto scandal is. A great example of chutzpah. "Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security. It was jointly owned by the American CIA...

Harassment scandals, Sheldon Cooper, Black Mirror and blockchain

Lots of good jokes in a popular TV show The Big Bang Theory are related to Sheldon Cooper's bureaucracy in interpersonal relationships: all these "roommate agreement", "relationship agreement", etc. However, because of these endless harassment scandals in media, now it seems like a best practice ...

Confluence REST API for reading and updating wiki pages

In previous posts I wrote how to automate the work with Atlassian Jira, including automated ticket labeling. Now let's try to use REST API of another popular Atlassian product - Confluence wiki engine. What you may want to automate in Confluence? Obviously, it may be useful to read the pages that...

Sending and receiving emails automatically in Python

There are different situations, when you may want to process email messages automatically. I will give some examples related to Vulnerability Management: Send a message to your colleagues that you are going to start a network vulnerability scan or WAS scan. It is much better than investigating...

MaxPatrol VM: An Ambitious Vision for Vulnerability Management Transformation

In this episode, I would like to share my thoughts about the new Vulnerability Management product by Positive Technologies - MaxPatrol VM. It was presented on November 16th, at the Standoff365 online conference full video in Russian. The presentation and concept of the product were very good. I...

Atlassian Jira, Python and automated labeling

I have already wrote about Atlassian Jira automation in "Automated task processing with JIRA API". But all examples there were with using of curl. So, I decided to make one more post about Jira API. This time with python examples and about labeling issues nice wordplay, right? . You can use label...

Not for Russians

Let's talk about web-site blocking. Not about cases of government censorship, not about cases where content is blocked for copyright reasons and not even about sanctions. I want to pay attention to the cases when companies block access to their own sites voluntarily for user from the whole countr...

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 i...

About Elevation of Privilege – Windows SMB Client (CVE-2025-33073) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - Windows SMB Client CVE-2025-33073 vulnerability. A vulnerability from the June Microsoft Patch Tuesday allows an attacker to execute a malicious script, forcing the victim's host to connect to the attacker's SMB server and authenticate, resulting in gaining SYSTEM...

April Linux Patch Wednesday

AprilLinux Patch Wednesday. Total vulnerabilities: 251. 164 in the Linux Kernel. No vulnerabilities show signs of being exploited in the wild. There are 7 vulnerabilities that appear to have publicly available exploits. For 2 vulnerabilities, exploit code with detailed explanation is available on...

Dealing with Nessus logs

Debugging Nessus scans is a very interesting topic. And it is not very well described even in Tenable University course. It become especially interesting when you see strange network errors in the scan results. Let's see how we can troubleshoot Nessus scans without sending Nessus DB files to...

Nessus Manager disappeared and Tenable.io On-Prem was announced

If you open Tenable Products page right now you will not see Nessus Manager there anymore. Nessus Manager page "The Power of Nessus for Teams" was also deleted. However, it is still mentioned in the product comparison. Agent-Based Scanning in SecurityCenter and SecurityCenter Continuous View "...

June Linux Patch Wednesday

June Linux Patch Wednesday. A total of 1,888 vulnerabilities 324 in the Linux kernel, and a whopping 728 in Chromium ❗️. For comparison, there were 1,638 vulnerabilities in May. The increase isn't as dramatic as it was from April to May, but it's still a new record. One of the vulnerabilities has...

About Elevation of Privilege – PAN-OS (CVE-2024-9474) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - PAN-OS CVE-2024-9474 vulnerability. An attacker with PAN-OS administrator access to the management web interface can perform actions on the Palo Alto device with root privileges. Linux commands can be injected via unvalidated input in script. The need for...

Anti-Phishing process with advanced phishing attacks simulation

This time I want to write about the service of my friends from Antiphish. They call it “security awareness and employee behaviour management platform”. Simply put, they teach company employees how to detect and avoid phishing attacks. By the way, they are great guys, made a demo for me, prepared...

Vulnerability Management Product Comparisons (October 2019)

Here I combined two posts 1.2 from my telegram channel about comparisons of Vulnerability Management products that were recently published in October 2019. One of them was more marketing, published by Forrester, the other was more technical and published by Principled Technologies. I had some...

PRYTEK meetup: Breach and Attack Simulation or Automated Pentest?

Last Tuesday, November 27, I spoke at "Business Asks for Cyber Attacks" meetup organized by PRYTEK investment platform. The event was held at the PRYTEK Moscow office in a beautiful XIX century building of a former textile manufactory. The goal of the meetup was to talk about new approaches in...

Making simple Nmap SPA web GUI with Apache, AngularJS and Python Twisted

The last time I was developing dynamic web applications years ago. I used CGI and PHP back then. Now I am really interested in a modern approach, when you have a Single Page Web Application SPA written in HTML and JavaScript, that makes http requests to some external API. It's pretty cool, becaus...

Vulchain Scanner: 5 basic principles

New Year holidays in Russia lasts 10 days this year! Isn't it an excellent opportunity to start a new project? So, I decided to make my own active network vulnerability scanner - Vulchain. Why? Well, first of all, it's fun. You can make the architecture from scratch, see the difficulties invisibl...

March Linux Patch Wednesday

MarchLinux Patch Wednesday. Total vulnerabilities: 1083. 879 in the Linux Kernel. Two vulnerabilities show signs of exploitation in the wild: Code Injection - GLPI CVE-2022-35914. An old vulnerability from CISA KEV, but first patched on March 3 in RedOS Linux. Memory Corruption - Safari...

What has become known about the Elevation of Privilege – Windows Common Log File System Driver (CVE-2024-49138) vulnerability from the December Microsoft Patch Tuesday a month later?

What has become known about the Elevation of Privilege - Windows Common Log File System Driver CVE-2024-49138 vulnerability from the December Microsoft Patch Tuesdaya month later? Almost nothing. This is a vulnerability in a standard Windows component, available in all versions starting with...

Vulnerability Management vendors and Vulnerability Remediation problems

It's not a secret, that Vulnerability Management vendors don't pay much attention to the actual process of fixing vulnerabilities, that they detect in the infrastructure Vulnerability Remediation. Although it seems to be the main goal of VM products: to make vulnerabilities fixed and whole IT...

My short review of “IDC Worldwide Security and Vulnerability Management Market Shares 2016”

On February 12 IDC published new report about Security and Vulnerability Management market. You can buy it on the official website for $4500. Or you can simply download free extract on Qualys website Thanks, Qualys!. I've read it and now I want to share my impressions. I think it's better start...

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,...

WannaCry about Vulnerability Management

Nearly all mainstream media wrote today about massive ransomware attacks around the world: 16 medical institutions in UK, strong rumours that huge companies in Russia, and even Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs suffered a damage. At this moment Kaspersky recorded more than 45,000 attacks in 74...

My projects that are not related to Information Security: Yennysay TTS and PyTouchOk companion app

Thanks to the long New Year holidays in Russia, I had time to work on my own projects that are not related to information security. I released them on github and recorded short demos by the way, Zoom is quite convenient for this! ?. Yennysay is a GUI text-to-speach tool that uses a free offline T...

VirtualBox GuestAdditions for Linux Guest OS

I often work with VirtualBox virtual machines and need to install GuestAdditions to use GUI applications comfortably. So, I decided to collect here some configuration scripts. CentOS 7 In the configuration a new VirtualBox machine I add 2 network adapters: Host Only Network NAT Installing clean...

Detectify Asset Inventory and Monitoring

Continuing the topic about perimeter services. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think that the external perimeter services should be considered as a fully functional replacement for custom Vulnerability Management processes. I would rather see their results as an additional feed showing the proble...

Code IB 2019: Vulnerability Management Masterclass

On March 29, I held one hour master class "HOW to avoid excessive formalism in Vulnerability Management process" at Code IB Profi 2019. Everything went quite well and I've got 88% positive ratings. Not bad result ^^. The main feature of the conference was a very special audience. The only way to...

New episode “In The Trend of VM” (#10): 8 trending vulnerabilities of November, zero budget VM and who should look for patches

New episode "In The Trend of VM" 10: 8 trending vulnerabilities of November, zero budget VM and who should look for patches. The competition for the best question on the topic of VM continues. Video on YouTube, LinkedIn Post on Habr rus Digest on the PT website Content: 00:29 Spoofing - Windows...

Programmers are also people who also make mistakes

It's the first part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show "Safe Environment" or "Safe Wednesday" - kind of wordplay in Russian recorded 29.03.2017. We were discussing why Software Vulnerabilities are everyone's problem. Full video in Russian without subtitles is available here. I adde...

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...