In the August 2019 Patch Tuesday release, Microsoft disclosed 7 RDP Vulnerabilities, out of which 4 are labeled as critical and 3 as important. All the critical vulnerabilities exist in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – and do not require authentication or user interaction. To exploit the vulnerabilities, an attacker would need to send a specially crafted request to the target systems Remote Desktop Service via RDP.

The cyber industry has named them as Seven Monkeys pertaining to seven CVEs released. Microsoft has released patches for these vulnerabilities and at least two of these (CVE-2019-1181 & CVE-2019-1182) can be considered “wormable” and equates them to BlueKeep. Of the three “Important” RDP vulnerabilities, one (CVE-2019-1223) is a DoS, and the other two (CVE-2019-1224 and CVE-2019-1225) disclose memory contents. Microsoft update addresses the vulnerability by correcting how Remote Desktop Services handles connection requests.

Continue reading …

Update Aug 13, 2019: Detect and Patch Windows Remote Desktop Vulnerabilities

This month’s Microsoft Patch Tuesday addresses 93 vulnerabilities with 29 of them labeled as Critical. Of the 29 Critical vulns, 10 are for scripting engines and browsers, 6 for Windows Graphics/Font Library, and 4 are for Office apps. In addition, Microsoft has patched 4 (!) Critical RCEs in Remote Desktop (plus 3 Important), 2 for Hyper-V, 2 in DHCP Client/Server, and one for LNK files. Adobe has also released a large number of patches covering multiple products.

Continue reading …

This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.40 includes updates and new features for Web Application Scanning, highlights as follows.

Continue reading …

With Black Hat USA 2019 now in progress, we wrap up this blog series with our final two session recommendations: Attacking and Defending the Microsoft Cloud and Practical Approach to Automate the Discovery and Eradication of Open-Source Software Vulnerabilities at Scale.

Attacking and Defending the Microsoft Cloud, which focuses on protecting Office 365 and Azure Active Directory, explores the most common attacks against the cloud and describes effective defenses and mitigation. While it focuses on Microsoft, some topics apply to other providers. The speakers — Trimarc CTO Sean Metcalf, and Mark Morowczynski, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, will cover topics including account compromise and token theft; methods to detect attack activity; and secure cloud administration.

Meanwhile, Practical Approach to Automate the Discovery and Eradication of Open-Source Software Vulnerabilities at Scale, outlines how Netflix identifies and eliminates vulnerabilities in the open source software components it uses in its applications at scale. The speaker, Aladdin Almubayed, is a Senior Application Security Engineer at Netflix who will describe the stages in Netflix’s automation strategy and the tools it uses.

Continue reading …

This new release of the Qualys Cloud Platform (VM, PC), version 8.21, adds new technologies and platforms, and support for scanning ESXi hosts on vCenter for vulnerabilities.

Continue reading …

Black Hat kicks off in a few days, and for Qualys customers still planning their schedule we have our weekly recommendation from among the conference’s many training courses and research briefings: The Enemy Within: Modern Supply Chain Attacks.

Speaker Eric Doerr, General Manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, promises to provide “practical guidance on how to defend against supply chain attacks and harden your systems.” 

Using examples of undisclosed supply chain attacks, he will cover topics such as attackers’ techniques and objectives, effective defense mechanisms, and the challenges of dealing with developers. 

Continue reading …

Qualys’ library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from OS and application vendors and other industry best practices.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

The June release includes the following new policies and updates:

• 5 new technologies
• 4 new Industry and Best Practice policies
• 4 updated policies

Continue reading …

Black Hat USA 2019 is just weeks away, and with scores of training courses and research briefings to choose from, planning your schedule can be a challenge. To help you, we’re posting a weekly recommendation on our blog, and explaining why we think Qualys customers could find it useful and relevant. This week’s choice is the presentation Trust and Transformation — The Post Breach Journey. 

In this talk, Jamil Farshchi, Equifax’s Chief Information Security Officer, will share experiences, best practices and insights about responding to a headline-grabbing data breach. In this 25-minute session, he’ll focus on how a business can regain the trust of customers, partners, investors, regulators and other stakeholders after suffering a significant data breach.

Continue reading …

With Black Hat USA 2019 less than a month away, we continue our blog series with weekly recommendations of training courses and research briefings to attend at the conference. Our pick this week: the research briefing Controlled Chaos: The Inevitable Marriage of DevOps & Security.

This 50-minute presentation focuses on the increasingly critical issue of securing DevOps, as this approach to agile and iterative software development and IT operations becomes the “business engine” for organizations.

Kelly Shortridge, Capsule8’s product strategy VP, and Nicole Forsgren, Google Cloud researcher and strategist, will explain the DevOps basics and the resilience and chaos engineering concepts. The speakers will address the importance of marrying DevOps and security, and the necessary shift away from security for its own sake to security as an enabler of business objectives.

Continue reading …

Qualys’ library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from OS and application vendors and other industry best practices.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

Continue reading …