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#7 Nessus Versus Malware - Top Ten Things You Didn't Know About Nessus

by Paul Asadoorian  on January 27, 2012

Nessus has several different plugins and techniques for helping you with the fight against malware. The video below is part 7 in our series of the top ten things you didn't know about Nessus and covers 3 different ways Nessus can be used to help detect malware:

Below are a few more examples of how Nessus can detect malware:

1. Nessus Network Checks

Nessus plugins in the "Backdoor" plugin family detect certain types of generic behavior on listening services that are indicative of malware. For example, plugin #35322 detects the presence of an HTTP backdoor. Nessus detects the web server remotely and identifies a condition where the web server, regardless of the request, returns a Windows executable:

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Tenable Network Security Podcast 110

by Paul Asadoorian  on January 24, 2012

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast Episode 110

Hosts

  • Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist

  • Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher

  • Ron Gula, CEO/CTO

  • Jack Daniel, Product Manager

Announcements

New & Notable plugins

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Tenable Network Security Episode 109

by Paul Asadoorian  on January 18, 2012

Hosts

  • Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist

  • Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher

  • Ron Gula, CEO/CTO

Announcements

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Tenable Network Security Podcast Episode 108

by Paul Asadoorian  on January 12, 2012

Hosts

  • Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist

  • Jack Daniel, Product Manager

  • Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher

  • Ron Gula, CEO/CTO

Announcements

  • Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials. We recently added a 38-minute tutorial of Nessus, covering most of the basic features.

  • We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable web site for more information about open positions.

  • You can subscribe to the Tenable Network Security Podcast on iTunes!

  • Tenable Tweets - You can find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tenablesecurity where we make product and company announcements, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more!

  • Want to ask questions about Nessus, SecurityCenter, LCE, and PVS and get answers from the experts at Tenable? Join Tenable's Discussion Forum for custom scripts, announcements, and more!

  • Tenable has released Nessus plugin 57462 to detect that nasty FreeBSD TELNET bug we touched on last week.

  • Nessus plugin 57461 was recently added to scan for Apple iOS Lockdown services

  • PVS can now detect systems reaching out to .xxx domains, enhanced OS identification.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday - January 2012

by Paul Asadoorian  on January 11, 2012

The first round of security bulletins from Microsoft this year raises some interesting questions about the vulnerabilities being patched. I found the following three advisories particularly interesting:

From MS12-002:

The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a legitimate file with an embedded packaged object that is located in the same network directory as a specially crafted executable file. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the logged-on user.

MS12-002 is ranked by Microsoft as important. Sure, it does require that the user browse file systems, however users can be baited, or even forced, to browse to a network share. Social engineering attacks can lure victims to specific sites, and SMB share paths can be embedded inside web pages and URLS, forcing the user to browse to a share or even a specific file.

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Tenable Network Security Podcast Episode 107

by Paul Asadoorian  on January 11, 2012

Hosts

  • Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist

  • Jack Daniel, Product Manager

  • Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher

Announcements

Stories

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Microsoft Patch Management Integration with Nessus - Part 1 WSUS

by Paul Asadoorian  on December 16, 2011

This is the first post in a two-part series that will cover how to configure Nessus and/or SecurityCenter to integrate with Microsoft's patch management software.

WSUS Patch Management Integration

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) is available from Microsoft to manage the distribution of updates and hotfixes for Microsoft products. WSUS server 3.0 SP2 supports management of patches for the products listed here, as well as Windows 7 and Windows server 2003 SP2 patches. If you are not familiar with WSUS it is freely available to Microsoft customers as part of your Windows server licensing agreement. A great article that covers all aspects of planning, deployment, and configuration is Windows Server Update Services Learning Roadmap Community Edition.

Nessus and SecurityCenter have the ability to query WSUS to verify whether or not patches are installed on systems managed by WSUS and display the patch information through the Nessus or SecurityCenter. When performing scans with the WSUS patch management plugins enabled and configured please note the following:

  • Credentials entered into the policy take priority - If you've entered credentials into the scan policy and they are valid for a target system, Nessus will login and perform credentialed scanning without querying the WSUS server data.

  • WSUS is queried when credentials fail - If credentials are not valid for a target system, or credentials are not entered at all into the policy at all, the WSUS server will be queried to obtain patch information for those targets. This also applies to other policy settings that may cause a credentialed scan to fail, such as the remote registry or administrative shares settings.

  • The WSUS plugin communicates only with the WSUS server - The WSUS plugin makes a connection to the WSUS server IP/hostname and port specified in the policy configuration (see below in the "Patch Management WSUS Preferences"). This is an important point, as the Nessus server(s) will require access to your WSUS server, which could mean making firewall rule changes to allow the connections. However, this is a significant advantage as your target systems do not need to communicate with the Nessus server directly, which means host firewalls and remote registry settings will not get in the way of a patch audit.

  • Patch information is only as up-to-date as your WSUS server - The data returned to Nessus by WSUS is only as current as the most recent data that the WSUS server has obtained from its managed hosts.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday - December 2011

by Paul Asadoorian  on December 13, 2011

"From Redmond with Love"

Recently, I had a chance to talk with Katie Moussouris, leader of the Security Community Outreach and Strategy team at Microsoft. The interview helped me realize that Microsoft has a lot to offer when it comes to not just fixing vulnerabilities in their own products, but other companies' software as well:

  • Microsoft has a team of people on the MSVR (Microsoft Vulnerability Research) who look for vulnerabilities in third-party software and help the third-parties fix the issues.

  • MSVR practices Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure, a term coined by the team and encompasses a philosophy for vulnerability disclosure (and one that omits the word "responsible" due to its misconstrued meanings).

  • Microsoft is showing others how to create more secure software through their SDL program (I hope Adobe is adopting this, and if they have, their implementation is falling short).

  • Microsoft has attempted to tell us where they document security vulnerabilities found internally, but this article seems to talk about variants, which are an off-shoot of the publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, not new vulnerabilities discovered internally by Microsoft. However, I am told that Microsoft does in fact document internally discovered vulnerabilities, but it's not as widely publicized as the monthly bulletins.

  • If you have the skills to come up with the next latest and greatest memory protection design, Microsoft could give you as much as $200,000 as part of the Blue Hat Prize contest.

One thing is for sure, I don't believe that Microsoft isn't trying to create more secure software. In fact, this month's MSRC post shows that critical vulnerabilities reported by outside parties continue to be on the decline. Some may argue that it's because people are not disclosing the vulnerabilities to Microsoft, and while that could be true, they deserve some of the credit for making efforts to improve software security.

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Tenable Network Security Podcast Episode 106

by Paul Asadoorian  on December 13, 2011

Hosts

  • Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist

  • Jack Daniel, Product Manager

  • Ron Gula, Tenable's CEO/CTO

Announcements

Stories


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