Tenable Blog

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 32

Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist & Kelly Todd, Compliance Analyst

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • SecurityCenter 4 Released - Taking Unified Security Monitoring to a higher level
• New Nessus training is now being offered at conferences! - The new course titled "Advanced Vulnerability Scanning Techniques Using Nessus" is now being offered at both Black Hat Las Vegas 2010 and BruCon 2010. It's a two-day course that will put students into a real-world environment where they will have to solve problems and identify vulnerabilities using the advanced features of the Nessus vulnerability scanner.
  
• You can provide feedback to this podcast and all of our social media outlets by visiting our discussions forum and adding messages to the "Tenable Social Media" thread. We would love to hear your feedback, questions, comments and suggestions! We put up a call for ideas on new Nessus videos, so please give us your feedback!


• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions. There are currently 6 open positions listed!


• You can subscribe to the NEW Tenable Network Security Podcast on iTunes! You can also subscribe to the new podcast RSS feed directly.


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

Tenable is again returning to the SOURCE Boston conference, held at the Seaport Hotel from April 21-23. This year Tenable will be delivering three presentations: Tenable CEO Ron Gula will be presenting a talk titled “How to Detect Penetration Testers” on Wednesday from 10:00am to 10:50 am; Carole Fennelly and Kelly Todd will be participating in the Vulnerability Management panel on Thursday from 10:00 to 10:50; and Paul Asadoorian will be presenting a talk titled “Embedded System Hacking and My Plot to Take Over the World” from 2:00 to 2:50 on Thursday. This blog provides a brief overview of these presentations.

Ron Gula’s talk, “How to Detect Penetration Testers” describes methods of detecting authorized penetration testers from a variety of technical and political aspects. Very often audit organizations feel the need to run a “surprise” audit on one of their divisions. This is intended to see how the target organization reacts to an unannounced penetration attempt, but very often results in disrupted production services and a lot of political finger pointing. This presentation provides tips and insights to make better use of firewall logs, netflow data and systems logs both to protect from situations that will embarrass the security program as well as protect resources from the real intruders.

This blog entry describes a basic worm detection that triggers multiple types of correlation rules. All detections were done passively using the Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS) and by observing network session traffic using the Log Correlation Engine (LCE). The principals in this blog entry and others in our ‘Event Analysis Training’ blog series can be used with a variety of NBAD, IDS and SIM solutions.

It’s A Bird, It’s a DoS, It’s Remote Code Execution!

I've always cautioned people about the danger of disregarding vulnerabilities that are labeled as "Denial of Service" (Such as MS10-014 from February) for a couple of reasons. First, when a bug exists in the code that allows something to "crash", there is usually a potential that the "crash" could somehow allow for code execution (remember that a buffer overflow is just a controlled crash). Second, when code is being analyzed so that the bug can be fixed, the surrounding code is often analyzed to be certain there are no other bugs or vulnerabilities. This analysis could lead to the disclosure of other vulnerabilities or a new way to turn a DoS into remote code execution. This appears to be the case with MS10-20, which was first publicly disclosed as a DoS bug in the SMB client. Microsoft is now reporting it as a vulnerability that "could” allow remote code execution. Upon further inspection, the security bulletin reports five vulnerabilities related to the SMB client that are patched in MS10-20. The first is the original DoS bug reported by Laurent Gaffie to the Full Disclosure mailing list on November 11, 2009. The general consensus was to dismiss this bug because it was "just a DoS".