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...

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...

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...

Vulners Nmap plugin

In previous post about Vulners vulnerability detection plugins for Burp and Google Chrome, I mentioned that it would be great to have a plugin for some free publicly available tool, like Nmap. And guys from the Vulners Team have recently released Nmap plugin. Isn't it awesome? To detect...

Microsoft security solutions against ransomware and APT

Last Tuesday I was invited to Microsoft business breakfast "Effective protection against targeted and multilevel attacks". Here I would like to share some of my thoughts on this. Need to mention that the food was delicious and the restaurant of Russian Geographical Society is a very lovely place...

New Nessus 7 Professional and the end of cost-effective Vulnerability Management (as we knew it)

It's an epic and really sad news. When people asked me about the cost-effective solution for Vulnerability Management I usually answered: "Nessus Professional with some additional automation through Nessus API". With just a couple of Nessus Professional scanning nodes it was possible to scan all...

Vulners.com vulnerability detection plugins for Burp Suite and Google Chrome

What is the main idea of version-based vulnerability detection, especially for Web Applications? With an access to the HTTP response html, headers, scripts, etc., you can get the name and version of some standards web application e.g. CMS, CRM, wiki, task tracker or names and versions of software...

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...

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...

Vulnerability Management for Network Perimeter

Network Perimeter is like a door to your organization. It is accessible to everyone and vulnerability exploitation does not require any human interactions, unlike, for example, phishing attacks. Potential attacker can automate most of his actions searching for an easy target. It's important not t...

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...

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...

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 ...

Vulnerability Management vendors and massive Malware attacks (following the Bad Rabbit)

After the latest Bad Rabbit ransomware attack all Top VM vendors Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7 wrote blog posts on this topic on the same day. Two days later Tripwire also published own review. Why do they care? They do not make antiviruses, endpoint protection or firewalls - the common tools against...

Study Vulnerability Assessment in Tenable University for free

Not so long ago, Tenable presented renewed online training platform - Tenable University. It is publicly available even for non-customers, for example, for Nessus Home users. However, not all courses are available in this case. I decided to check it out, registering as non-customer. Logged in...

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...

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...

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...

CWEs in NVD CVE feed: analysis and complaints

As you probably know, one of the ways to describe the nature of some software vulnerability is to provide corresponding CWE Common Weakness Enumeration ids. Let's see the CWE links in NVD CVE base. I have already wrote earlier how to deal with NVD feed using python in "Downloading and analyzing N...

Vulners NASL Plugin Feeds for OpenVAS 9

As I already wrote earlier, you can easily add third party nasl plugins to OpenVAS. So, my friends from Vulners.com realised generation of NASL plugins for OpenVAS using own security content. I've tested it for scanning CentOS 7 host. And it works = Let's see the whole process. I assume that we...

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...