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...

Downloading and analyzing NVD CVE feed

In previous post "New National Vulnerability Database visualizations and feeds" I mentioned JSON NVD feed. Let's see what data it contains, how to download and analyse it. First of all, we need to download all files with CVEs from NVD database and save them to some directory. Unfortunately, there...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

Burp Suite Free Edition and NTLM authentication in ASP.net applications

As you know, Burp Suit is a scanner for advanced Web Application Security researchers. However, the free version of Burp is more like Firebug analogue, but much more functional. Let's see how to install it and use for website analysis. This analysis may be necessary to find vulnerabilities or...

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...

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...

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%...

Downloading entire Vulners.com database in 5 minutes

Today I once again would like to talk about Vulners.com and why, in my opinion, it is the best vulnerability database that exist nowadays and a real game-changer. The main thing is transparency. Using Vulners you not only can search for security content see "Vulners – Google for hacker", but...

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...

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...

Qualys new look and new products

As you all know, it's Black Hat 2017 time. This year Qualys seems to be the main newsmaker among Vulnerability Management vendors. Qualys Team renewed logo and website, updated marketing strategy, presented two new products: CloudView and CertView. I decided to take a look. Talking about design, ...

Automated posting on Vkontakte public pages using VK API and Python

Vk.com Vkontakte is the most popular social network Russia and Ex-USSR with 430+ million users. Originally it was a Facebook clone. But now, after 10 years of development, these two services are quite different from each other. Traditional advantages of vk.com - huge amount of free music and vide...

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...

Adding third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS

If you want to develop nasl plugins for OpenVAS, you might be interested how to import them in scanner. So, I was also interested. First of all, I decided to copy one of existing nasl scripts. I chose script that successfully detected vulnerability on a target host. Thus, in the case of importing...

Petya the Great and why *they* don’t patch vulnerabilities

I really like this. Just imagine. Quiet, routine, everyday Vulnerability Management process in organizations: scanning-patching, scanning-patching, scanning-patching… And then. Suddenly! PEEETYYA!!! And at very same moment everything changes. People from different companies start to communicate...

Vulners Cloud Agents for Vulnerability Management

A very good news! Vulners Team is ready to present complete functionality for vulnerability audit. And it's not just an Audit API that you have to use somehow in your own scripts, but an enterprise ready product, like agent-based vulnerability scanning in Qualys and Tenable. You can try it for...

GSM Community Edition and lagging OpenVAS Plugin Feed

As I already wrote in "Installing OpenVAS 9 from the sources", since May 2017 OpenVAS 9 is available in a form of free virtual appliance. It is called GSM Community Edition GCE and is based on Greenbone commercial product GSM ONE. What's the difference between GSM ONE and free GCE? GSM Community...

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...

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...

New vulnersBot for Telegram with advanced searches and subscriptions

Vulners.com team have recently presented a new version of vulnerability intelligence bot for Telegram messenger. Now you can search for vulnerabilities and other security content by talking with bot. Searches For example, I've heard about new critical vulnerability in Samba called SambaCry by...

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...

Vulnerability Quadrants

Hi everyone! Today I would like talk about software vulnerabilities. How to find really interesting vulnerabilities in the overall CVE flow. And how to do it automatically. First of all, let's talk why we may ever need to analyze software vulnerabilities? How people usually do their Vulnerability...

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 ...

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...

CISO Forum 2017

Last week I have attended CISO Forum 2017 in Moscow. I was talking there about "Vulnerability Quadrants: automated hot topic detection in public vulnerability CVE flow". Today I want to share my impressions about the forum itself. To be short, I liked it very much. Both exhibition and...

Why you can’t update it all at once?

It’s the second part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show “Safe Environment” recorded 29.03.2017. In this part we talk about vulnerabilities in Linux and proprietary software, problems of patch an vulnerability management, and mention some related compliance requirements. Video with...

Installing OpenVAS 9 from the sources

In last month Greenbone Networks and OpenVAS development team have finally presented new OpenVAS 9 with new GUI, improved multi-scanner support, improved asset management, etc. We have been waiting for this release for 2 years! Upd. Please note, that entire procedure for separating scanners onto...

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,...

Making Splunk searches using REST API

When you have already learned how to make search requests in Splunk GUI, it may be nice to figure out how do the same from your own scripts using the Splunk REST API. It's really easy! Ok, we have a Splunk SIEM account: user="user" pass="Password123" And we want to execute this search request:...

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...

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,...

Tracking software versions using Nessus and Splunk

Let's say you have already exported scan results from Nessus or Tenable SecurityCenter to Splunk using HTTP event connector, or in some other way. And you see that some critical software vulnerability was published. For example, this month Jira critical vulnerability. How to find out, do we have...

Somebody is watching you: IP camera, TV and Emma Watson’s smartphone

Today I want to talk today about privacy in a most natural sense. You probably have an internet-connected device with camera an microphone: smartphone, tablet, smart TV, ip camera, baby monitor, etc. - Can it be used to record video/audio and spy on you? - Of course, yes! - Only government and...