Tag Archive for: IT security

Elmar Geese

Follina (CVE-2022-30190): Greenbone’s Feeds Offer Protection

Once again, a flaw has surfaced in Microsoft Office that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code on the systems of attacked users using manipulated documents. Known as Follina, CVE-2022-30190 has been known for years, but Microsoft has not fixed it to date. Greenbone has added an appropriate vulnerability test to their feeds to detect the new Follina vulnerability in Microsoft Office.

Follina Requires Immediate Action

The CVE named “Follina” is critical and requires immediate action: just opening Microsoft Word documents can give attackers access to your resources. Because a flaw in Microsoft Office allows attackers to download templates from the Internet via ms-msdt:-URI handler at the first click, attackers can create manipulated documents that, in the worst case, can take over entire client systems or spy on credentials.

According to Microsoft, the “protected view” offers protection. However, because users can deactivate this with just one click, the US manufacturer advises deactivating the entire URL handler via a registry entry. As of today, all Office versions seem to be affected.

Greenbone Enterprise Feed Helps and Protects

The Greenbone Enterprise Feed and the Greenbone Community Feed now contain an authenticated check for Microsoft’s proposed workaround, helping you to protect yourself from the impact of the vulnerability. Our development team is monitoring the release of Microsoft patches and recommendations for further coverage. We will inform about updates here on the blog.

Securing IT Networks for the Long Term

If you want to know which systems in your network are (still) vulnerable to vulnerabilities – including the critical vulnerability associated with CVE-2022-30190– our vulnerability management helps you. It applies to systems that definitely need to be patched or otherwise protected. Depending on the type of systems and vulnerability, they can be found better or worse. Detection is also constantly improving and being updated. New gaps are found. Therefore, there may always be more systems with vulnerabilities in the network. Thus, it is worthwhile to regularly update and scan all systems. For this purpose, Greenbone’s vulnerability management offers appropriate automation functions.

Vulnerability management is an indispensable part of IT security. It can find risks and provides valuable information on how to eliminate them. However, no single measure, including vulnerability management, offers 100 % security. To make a system secure, many systems are used, which in their entirety should provide the best possible security.

Contact Free Trial Buy Here Back to Overview
/by
Markus Feilner

Predictive Vulnerability Management with Greenbone

,
Jennifer Außendorf, project lead of the project for Predictive Vulnerability Management

Project lead Jennifer Außendorf

Identifying tomorrow’s vulnerabilities today with Predictive Vulnerability Management: Together with international partners from across Europe, Greenbone’s cyber security experts are developing a novel cyber resilience platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, helping to prevent attacks.

Greenbone is strengthening its internal research in the field of “Predictive Vulnerability Management” and will additionally participate in publicly funded research and development projects in 2022. Currently, the security experts are working on a funding application for a European Union project. Until the first phase of the application submission is completed, Greenbone is involved within an international consortium and is working on a joint cyber resilience platform. The focus here is on preventing attacks in advance so that remedial action can be taken more quickly in an acute emergency. Methods for detecting anomalies by combining and analyzing a wide variety of sources from network monitoring and network analysis data will help to achieve this. The research area focuses on active defense against cyber attacks and includes penetration tests and their automation and improvement through machine learning.

In an interview, project manager Jennifer Außendorf explains what the term “Predictive Vulnerability Management” means.

Jennifer, what is cyber resilience all about? Predictive Vulnerability Management sounds so much like Minority Report, where the police unit “Precrime” hunted down criminals who would only commit crimes in the future.

Jennifer Außendorf: Predicting attacks is the only overlap, I think. The linchpin here is our Greenbone Cloud Service. It allows us to access very large amounts of data. We analyze it to enable prediction and remediation, providing both warnings for imminent threats and effective measures to address the vulnerabilities.

For example, we can also identify future threats earlier because we are constantly improving Predictive Vulnerability Management with machine learning. In the area of “Remediation”, we create a “reasoned action” capability for users: they are often overwhelmed by the number of vulnerabilities and find it difficult to assess which threats are acute and urgent based purely on CVSS scores.

One solution would be to provide a short list of the most critical current vulnerabilities – based on the results of artificial intelligence. This should consider even more influencing variables than the CVSS value, which tends to assess the technical severity. Such a solution should be user-friendly and accessible on a platform – of course strictly anonymized and GDPR-compliant.

Why is Greenbone going public with this now?

Jennifer Außendorf: On the one hand, this is an incredibly exciting topic for research, for which we provide the appropriate real-life data. The large amounts of data generated by the scans can be used in a variety of ways to protect customers. Figuring out what is possible with the data and how we can use that to add value for users and customers is a big challenge.

On the other hand, Greenbone wants to use the project to strengthen cyber security in the EU. For one thing, this is a hot topic right now: customers often end up with American companies when looking for cyber defenses, which usually doesn’t sit well with the GDPR. Greenbone has decided to launch a project consortium and will seek project funding in parallel.

Who will or should participate in the consortium?

Jennifer Außendorf: The consortium will consist of a handful of companies as the core of the group and will be complemented by research partners, technical partners for development and a user group of other partners and testers.

Because the project will take place at EU level, it is important for us to involve as many different member states as possible. We hope that the different backgrounds of the partners will generate creative ideas and approaches to solutions, from which the project can only benefit. This applies equally to the phase of building up the consortium.

Are there other players in the field of Predictive Vulnerability Management so far or has no one tried this yet?

Jennifer Außendorf: At the moment, we don’t see any competitors – Greenbone also deliberately wants to be an innovation driver here. Yes, the buzzwords “thought leadership”, “cloud repurpose” and “cyber resilience” are certainly floating around, but there is one thing that only we (and our customers) have: the anonymized data, which is essential for the research results, and above all the large amount of data that makes it possible to apply machine learning and other methods in connection with artificial intelligence in the first place – only we have that.

What is the current status there, what is on the roadmap?

Jennifer Außendorf: We are currently in the process of specifying the individual topics in more detail with the first research partners. They have many years of experience in cyber security and machine learning and provide very valuable input. We are also currently working on expanding the consortium and recruiting additional partners. Work on the actual application should start soon.

Our goal is to incorporate the results of the project directly into our products and thus make them available to our customers and users. Ultimately, they should benefit from the results and thus increase cyber resilience in their companies. That is the ultimate goal.

Contact Free Trial Buy Here Back to Overview
/by
Elmar Geese

Scanning for Vulnerabilities like Log4Shell – How Does It Work?

Greenbone’s vulnerability management finds applications with Log4j vulnerabilities in systems that definitely need to be patched or otherwise protected. Depending on the type of systems and vulnerability, these can be found better or worse. Detection is also constantly improving and being updated. New breaches are found. Therefore, there may always be more systems with Log4Shell vulnerabilities in the network. For this reason, it is worthwhile to regularly update and scan all systems. The Greenbone vulnerability management offers appropriate automation functions for this purpose. But how are vulnerabilities found, and where can they be hidden? Why are vulnerabilities not always directly detectable? The following article will give you a brief insight into how scanning for vulnerabilities like Log4Shell works.

A vulnerability scanner makes specific queries to systems and services and can read from the responses what kind of systems and services they are, but also what products are behind them. This also includes information such as their versions or even settings and other properties. In many cases, this makes it possible to determine whether a vulnerability exists and whether it has already been eliminated. In practice, these are sometimes highly complicated and nested queries, but above all they are also very, very many. Entire networks are scanned for thousands of different vulnerabilities.

The Log4j vulnerability “Log4Shell” (CVE-2021-44228) is a flawed program library used in many web services products. Therefore, partly it is directly visible through a vulnerability scan, but partly it is hidden behind other elements. That is why there is not only one vulnerability test for Log4j, but several. More are added all the time because the manufacturers of the respective products share relevant information and also provide updates to close the gaps. The list of systems affected by Log4Shell is constantly updated at https://gist.github.com/SwitHak/b66db3a06c2955a9cb71a8718970c592.

Some of the vulnerability tests require an authenticated scan. This means that the scanner must first log into a system and then detect the vulnerability in the system. An authenticated scan can provide more details about vulnerabilities on the scanned system.

The vulnerability tests that are suitable to find the Log4j vulnerability are provided collectively in a scan configuration. Greenbone keeps this “Log4j” scan configuration continuously up-to-date in order to keep adding new tests. As a result, a scan may report a Log4j vulnerability tomorrow that was not found today. It is therefore advisable to configure the Log4j scan to run automatically on a regular basis. This is especially important in the next weeks, when many software vendors are gathering more findings. Greenbone continuously integrates these findings into the tests and the scan configuration.

scanning for vulnerabilities like Log4Shell
Does a Vulnerability Have to Be Exploited to Find It?

Exploiting a vulnerability to find it is not advisable. And fortunately, it is not necessary either. Doing so could cause the very damage that should be avoided at all costs. Moreover, a product vendor that provides vulnerability exploitation as a feature would potentially strongly encourage misuse of that feature, which raises further – not only legal – issues. Therefore, Greenbone’s vulnerability management does not include such features.

Exploitation of the Log4j vulnerability as attackers would do is also not required to prove the existence of the vulnerability. Greenbone has developed several tests to prove Log4Shell, each of which looks at systems in different depths. Several tests can detect the Log4j vulnerability with 100 % certainty, most with 80 % to 97 % certainty. Some tests also collect indicators of 30 % where they do not get close enough to the vulnerability. Each test at Greenbone makes a statement about detection certainty, which is stated as “Quality of Detection.”

What Is the Role of Software Product Vendors?

Manufacturers of a wide variety of products can use Log4j libraries, which are now vulnerable with it. Product manufacturers have included Log4j in different ways. Usually, a deep scan can find Log4j without the vendor’s help. However, most manufacturers also support the process through public vulnerability reports. These can then be used to write vulnerability tests that can provide a reliable vulnerability statement even with less deep scans. The reason for this is that the scans can use simpler configurations through vendor information. In addition, they also run faster.

In principle, however, a vulnerability scanner can also check and find vulnerabilities without the manufacturer publishing a vulnerability report.

Conclusion

Vulnerability management is an indispensable part of IT security. It can find risks and provides valuable information on how to fix them. However, no single measure provides 100 % security, not even vulnerability management. To make a system secure, many elements are used, which in their entirety should provide the best possible security.

This is comparable to a vehicle, where the passenger compartment, seat belts, airbags, brake support, assistance systems and much more increase safety, but can never guarantee it. Vulnerability management makes risks controllable.


Contact Free Trial Buy Here Back to Overview

/by