If you have a SQL server on your network, you know how important it is to monitor transactions to identify suspicious activity.

The Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS) can sniff SQL traffic in real-time and then send SYSLOG data to the Log Correlation Engine (LCE) that looks like this:

<36> Jun 21 08:34:05 pvs: 149.X.X.X:0|149.X.X.X:0|7019|Database command logging|version: 1.19 PVS has observed the following command from a database client to the database server (206.X.X.X): SELECT COUNT(CASE WHEN e.EmailType = ‘User’ OR t.ProcessType = ‘Borrowing’ THEN 1 ELSE null end) as Borrowing,|INFO

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 40

Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist

Announcements

• One new blog post has been published this week (several more are in the queue!):
  • Tenable Black Hat USA 2010 Party !
• 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.
  
• Be certain to check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus tutorials.


• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions. There are currently 9 open positions listed, including a Digital/Web Strategy Coordinator.


• 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 various announcements, list Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Dennis Brown - Evil Malware, PDF Attacks, and more!

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • Penetration Testing Summit 2010
  • Nessus Cisco Compliance Checks
• 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.
• Be certain to check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus tutorials.
• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions. There are currently 9 open positions listed, including a Digital/Web Strategy Coordinator.
• 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 various announcements, Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Tenable has authored a Nessus plugin (ID 46689) named “Cisco IOS Compliance Checks” that implements the APIs used to audit systems running Cisco IOS. This plugin is pre-compiled with the Nessus “.nbin” format. This provides ProfessionalFeed users a method of using Tenable provided .audit files, or their own audit policies, to audit Cisco devices to ensure compliance with corporate policy. This functionality provides a wide range of audit capability including ACL policy detection, service status, device access control and more.

New Keywords

Many of the .audit keywords are the same as for other devices such as Windows and Unix systems. The Cisco compliance checks add two new keywords specific to Cisco IOS based devices:

• feature_set - Similar to the “system” keyword in the Unix Compliance Checks, this keyword checks the Feature Set (e.g. AdvancedEnterprise, AdvancedIP, Advanced Security, K9, etc) version of the Cisco IOS and either runs the resulting check or skips the check because of a failed regex. This is useful for cases where a check is only applicable to systems with a particular Feature Set (e.g. SSH in K8 and K9 bundles).
• ios_version - Similar to the “system” keyword in the Unix Compliance Checks, this keyword checks the version of the Cisco IOS and either runs the resulting check or skips the check because of a failed regex. This is useful for cases where a check is only applicable to systems with a particular IOS version.

The SANS Penetration Testing Summit was held this year at the Hyatt Baltimore in Baltimore, MD on June 14 - 15 and was focused on “What Works in Penetration Testing".

The event was held just across from Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles.

Tips For Penetration Testers

I participated in a panel discussion with Joshua Wright, Vincent Liu and Joshua Abrams titled, "Most Effective New Technique You've Applied in the Past 12 Months". We started by having each of us share two fun, new or interesting penetration testing techniques that we've applied in the past year. It was a great discussion, covering topics such as wireless, vulnerability assessments and what tools to get started with.

I shared a story with the audience about lock picking. The story details the travels of my friend (let's call him "Bob") who was put into a situation where he had to pick a lock. Bob did not have his lock-picking set and was forced to use more crude tools. In the end, Bob ended up prying off the entire doorknob with even more rudimentary and crude tools. I then circled back around to the lessons learned and how they apply to both lock picking and penetration testing:

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 38

Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • Microsoft Patch Tuesday Roundup - June 2010 - “Everything is Vulnerable” Edition
  • June 17th Webinar - Continuous Network Monitoring with Nessus and Tenable's Unified Security Monitoring solution
  • Detecting the Recent Adobe 0-Day (APSA10-01) with Nessus
• 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.
• Be certain to check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus tutorials.
• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions. There are currently 9 open positions listed, including a Digital/Web Strategy Coordinator.
• 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 various announcements, Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Interview: Josh Corman on Rugged Software

Josh and Paul talk about software security, getting developers to write "secure" code, embedded systems security challenges, and the Rugged Software initiative.

Download Tenable Podcast Episode 38

On June 4, 2010, Adobe announced a new attack being exploited in the wild that targeted Adobe products, and word spread quickly. Adobe’s security bulletin (APSA10-01) provided few details, but confirmed that attackers were actively exploiting a vulnerability that affected their Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Acrobat. The advisory provided some immediate mitigation techniques such as upgrading Flash Player to 10.1 RC or removing access to authplay.dll for Reader or Acrobat. These mitigations may not be practical for many environments due to upgrade policies or the fact that without authplay.dll, Reader and Acrobat will crash if loading a PDF that contains SWF content.

Tenable has already released two plugins that use a credentialed check on Windows systems to determine the version of Acrobat (Plugin 46851) or Reader (Plugin 46852) installed on a system, check for the presence of authplay.dll in the installation directory and warn if a vulnerable combination is detected for this issue. These plugins complement the older version detection plugins for Acrobat (Plugin 40797) or Reader (Plugin 20836) that can always be used to compare installed software to vulnerable versions listed in Adobe advisories, until more accurate detection plugins can be created.

On June 10, Tenable released plugins to detect the APSB10-14 upgrade for Adobe Air (Plugin 46858) and Flash (Plugin 46859). The Adobe upgrades for these two products fix the 0-day vulnerability in two of the four vulnerable products. Per the advisory, Adobe does not have an upgrade for Acrobat or Reader, but expects to by June 29. When Adobe makes the upgrades available, Tenable will update existing plugins or create new ones as required to verify a system is not vulnerable.

APSA10-01 “0-day” at a Glance:

• Date published: June 4, 2010
• CVE: 2010-1297 (assigned April 6)
• BID: 40586
• OSVDB: 65141
• Malware: Trojan.Pidief.J

Here we go again - another massive “Patch Tuesday”, brought to you by Microsoft. This particular bundle addresses 34 vulnerabilities in Windows, IE, Office, .NET Framework, IIS and Sharepoint, a tie for the largest vulnerability count in a single Microsoft Patch Tuesday to date. The advisories include a wide range of vulnerabilities including code execution, privilege escalation, information disclosure, denial of service and cross-site scripting (XSS).

Among the vulnerabilities addressed in June’s updates are two issues that were recognized by Microsoft in February and April. Three of the ten updates have been given severity ratings of “critical” while the other seven are rated as “important”. Six updates affect the Windows operating system, including Microsoft’s newest OS, Windows 7. As always, Tenable has released Nessus plugins to perform credentialed checks to detect each of these vulnerabilities and help aid your remediation processes.

Patch Tuesday Breakdown and Thoughts:

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 37

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

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • OWASP: From FROC to SecurityCenter
  • Getting ‘lucky’: When Nessus Finds 0-Days
  • SecurityCenter Webinar in French! (June 15th)
• 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.
  
• Be certain to check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus tutorials.


• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions. There are currently 8 open positions listed, including a Digital/Web Strategy Coordinator.


• 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 various announcements, Nessus plugin statistics and more!

The Front Range OWASP Conference (FROC) 2010 was held in Denver, Colorado last week and provided a full day of talks and events aimed at a wide variety of information security professionals. The event featured three speaker tracks: “App Sec/Technical”, “Cloud/Mobile/Emerging” and “Management/Executive” as well as a panel discussion and Capture the Flag (CTF) contest. Since 2003, OWASP has maintained and updated the OWASP Top 10 list to categorize and prioritize web application risks as they have evolved over the years, and the list has become a popular tool for helping organizations assess risk and formulate their remediation strategies.

Historically, vulnerability scanners have been signature based: looking for issues based on a static signature, behavior such as banner output or service response output to certain queries. If the scanner was not specifically directed to look for a given vulnerability, it would not find it. Many in the security industry still view most network vulnerability scanners in this light. The same people consider dedicated web application scanners as the only automated tools that can intelligently discover vulnerabilities not previously disclosed (i.e., “0-day”). This is simply not the case. Nessus’ focus is on enumerating known vulnerabilities, but it also leverages a mature web application scanner capable of finding unknown vulnerabilities.

Nessus’ ten-year history and over 36,000 plugins give it a solid base for finding vulnerabilities. Despite many vulnerabilities being ‘old’ and thought to be patched, vendors and OEMs have a habit of re-using code over and over. What may have been an old vulnerability in light-weight web server could reappear years later in a device with an embedded web server running an administrator interface.

While most plugins are signature based, Nessus has had the ability to find undiscovered vulnerabilities since 2001. Years before the first web application scanner was released, Nessus used a handful of plugins that could find generic overflows and format strings regardless of the service or if they were known to be vulnerable. While these tests are simple, they are very effective at ferreting out software that performs no sanity checking of user-supplied input.

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 36

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

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • Nessus Spotlight: su+sudo Feature
  • SecurityCenter Webinar in French!
• 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.
• Be certain to check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus tutorials.
• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions. There are currently 7 open positions listed, including a Digital/Web Strategy Coordinator.
• 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 various announcements, Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Interview: Ron Gula - Security Architecture Summit

I invite you to join Renaud Deraison, author of Nessus and co-founder of Tenable Network Security for a free webinar. Unlike most of our other webinars, this one will be presented in French! There will be a several topics presented. One topic is "À la carte", that includes what's new in SecurityCenter 4 and how to use it to detect vulnerabilities, missing patches, intrusion events, and network anomalies. In another topic, Renaud will describe how to give attackers the "Coup de grâce" whether you are an auditor, risk analyst, monitoring compliance, security analyst or even an executive in Information Technology.

Date: June 15, 2010

Time: 10:30 AM EST

Link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/935408993