Vulnerability Management

To understand the battlefield, you need a broad view

It is always a little bemusing to hear that we only provide pentests. Since 2001, SensePost has offered a very comprehensible vulnerability management service that’s evolved through multiple generations of technologies and methodologies into a service we’re very proud of. The Managed Vulnerability Scanning (“MVS”) service makes use of our purpose-built BroadView scanning technology to scan a number of high profile South African and European clients. More information can be found…

The Yeti is here

After several months of dedicated … uh dedication, our new network footprinting tool is being made available to the masses. It’s called Yeti and it is a cross-platform, Java application. It’s predecessor, BidiBlah, was only available on Windows platforms and hopefully with Yeti we can now offer Internet intelligence gathering to everyone. So what does Yeti do: Top level domain expansion (tld expand) Forward lookups (mx,ns,a,cname and zone transfers) Reverse…

HTTP Methods per Directory

A very common finding in our day to day vulnerability management endevours is the HTTP Methods Per Directory. In its most basic form, HackRack will determine which HTTP methods are allowed on various web or CGI directories by calling the OPTIONS methods per directory. On its own it is not always significant but as soon as you have directories that allow for PUT or DELETE, and weak directory permissions are…

I know what your cert did last summer

Most of our clients that make use of our vulnerability management service, HackRack, manage a large and usually interactive web application environment, that makes use of SSL. HackRack would then often report on findings such as weak cyphers in use (critical if the client has to adhere to PCI DSS), mismatching cert names and domain names, and then expired certs. Now, this is easy to check and re-check when you…

BroadView V4 Attributes

Following on from Evert’s posting about the new BroadView v4, I’d like to showcase a specific aspect of BV that we’ve found useful, namely Attributes. These are small pieces of data collected and maintained for each host scanned by BV including somewhat mundane bits of info like IP address and OS but, they also include some really tasty morsels about remote hosts that are scanned. Attributes are collected on a…

BroadView – coming of age

Ever since Ron Gula’s RiskyBusiness talk #142 about their Nessus philosophy, I decided to come out of the closet and share with our readers the work we do in the vulnerability management field. [Ed: If you don’t listen to Risky Business then, as we say in South Africa, eish.] Ron explained that with Nessus they aim to give users a tool that can be used for monitoring and auditing –…

Open Patch Management Survey

Rich Mogull (who’s stuff I really quite dig) has launched an ‘Open Patch Management Survey’ via the SecurityMetrics blog. Its an interesting idea, and they plan to release both their analysis *and* the raw data, which might be really insightful for our VMS stuff. Corporations can take the SurveyMonkey survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=SjehgbiAl3mR_2b1gauMibQw_3d_3d, and there’s some nice material already available at http://securosis.com/projectquant. Here’s the rest of Rich’s message (pls forgive the cross-post): Our goal…

The power of data

We recently introduced some neat blizzards onto a PoC Broadview client. On tha back of Conficker, our Broadview Dashboard sports a couple of instantly available blizzards that show: 1. How many machines, on all scans for the last 10 days, have patch MS08-067 missing 2. How many machines do not have SMS Agents, EPO Agents or Any AV installed 3. And without too much hassle one can quickly see where machines…

Turn of the century deja vu?

The recent widespread carnage caused by the Conficker worm is astounding, but is also comforting, in a strange way. It has been a good few years since the world saw a worm outbreak of this magnitude. Indeed, since the Code Red, Slammer and Blaster days, things have been fairly quiet on the Interwebs front. As a community, it seems we very quickly forgot the pains caused by these collective strains…

Vulnerability management and the Blogs

Gegroet just a quick note on VM. Google is now offering Google Blog Search Beta and I thought it interesting to see who is blogging on vulnerability management.Some of the output includes: i) “Vulnerability Management” = 6,330 hits ii) “Vulnerability Management” + Dummies = 314 hits iii) “Vulnerability Management” + ineffective = 16 hits iv) “Vulnerability Management” + effective = 314 Probably 90% of all hits came from vendors and…