Passively Detect all of your Exploitable Vulnerabilities - PVS 3.4 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of version 3.4 of the Passive Vulnerability Scanner. Tenable recommends that all current PVS customers upgrade to this version as it has major performance enhancements and exploitability reference data in the vulnerability reports. 

PVS 3.4 includes support for vulnerability correlation with public exploit sources, such as Metasploit, Immunity Canvas and Core Impact. CVSSv2 temporal scores are also supported in the vulnerability reports. Following is an example screen shot: 

In this sanitized screen shot, not only did the PVS identify a vulnerability in QuickTime, but one that is also exploitable by Core Impact and Metasploit. SecurityCenter can be used to quickly identify these types of serious security issues.

The ability to identify exploitable vulnerabilities in real time without having to deploy agents, perform scans or perform a penetration test is of tremendous value and can help minimize the amount of scans and audits your organization has to complete. 

PVS 3.4 also includes several performance improvements. Tenable has beta tested this release on networks that have sustained network speeds in the 500 - 700 Mb/s range. We also have several customers who have deployed PVS on 10 Gb interfaces and are monitoring 500 - 1000 Mb/s of data. In these cases, PVS was configured to log both a vulnerability report and log realtime web, SMB, NFS, DNS, SQL and FTP queries. 

File sharing logs can be sent to SIEMs or Tenable's Log Correlation Engine to provide content awareness. Following is an example log for a Google query of "Nessus rocks":

Jan 27 09:58:36 192.168.1.58:0|192.168.1.58:0|4|7041|HTTP request detection|The following GET/POST request was observed:;DIP: 72.14.204.103:80;URI: /search?sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&q=nessus+rocks&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=6131a187c1c25a1b&tch=1&ech=1&psi=R5pBTf24NoeueLKKiMIB12961449681597;Referer: http://www.google.com/;Host: www.google.com;User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.237 Safari/534.10;Query: YES;version: 1.11|

The LCE can easily view, sort search and report on SMB file shares, files downloaded from the Internet and many other protocols. Following is an example screen shot that shows four days of SMB file sharing at a major university:

Such data is useful for user monitoring, insider threat analysis, virus analysis, compromise detection and incident response.  

Tenable continues to work on a PVS 3.4 build for the Windows operating system, the ability to create CyberScope reports with passive vulnerability and CPE data and on PVS 4.0 which will have even greater throughput. Please contact Tenable's sales team if you are interested in passive network monitoring for your network.