Tenable Blog

Are you pluggin’ along looking for vulnerabilities? The heart of Tenable vulnerability detection comes from the individual tests called plugins – simple programs that check for specific flaws. Each plugin contains a vulnerability description, fix recommendations, and algorithms for detection. Tenable products receive new plugins nightly, which keep the tests current and relevant.

Finding plugin information

 SecurityCenter® has at least four places to research plugins:

How many security frameworks or compliance standards does IT need? If you ask compliance professionals, the answer would be, “Oh, just one more.” If you ask any IT professional, the most likely answer would be, “Oh gosh, not one more!” And yet organizations have been inundated with compliance standards; and it's not always clear how well they comply or how good their internal processes are when stacked up against industry-wide accepted standards.

As a Reverse Engineer at Tenable, I investigate disclosed vulnerabilities in order to write remote plugins for the Nessus® vulnerability scanner. Each investigation is unique and presents its own set of challenges. In some cases, new vulnerabilities are uncovered. One such investigation happened earlier this year when I was analyzing CVE-2016-3737 in Red Hat JBoss Operations Network (JON).

In Mr. Robot Season 2 Episode 4, as Darlene and Elliot watch a horror movie, Darlene suggests calling a dinner delivery service called Postmates - a service she hacked using code injection. As they chat, Elliot recalls his previous job. He remembers the details of his pen testing projects, and says it was his job to keep hacking until the company’s systems were “hacker proof.” I asked myself, what is “hacker proof” and is such a thing even possible?

In Nessus 6.7, file system scanning functionality was introduced that could look for specific file hashes of files on disk. This was in addition to the running process detection which has been supported for quite some time. Now, as part of the Nessus 6.8 release, we’ve introduced YARA to our Windows malware file scanning subsystem. This provides an alternate method of defining criteria to search for files based on textual or binary patterns.

Public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud—regardless of which cloud-computing model you choose, there is a good chance a part of it is already powered by an open source solution. And when it comes to open source solutions for the cloud, there isn’t a better, more stable and comprehensive solution than OpenStack.

“It worked in Dev, it works in Dev. Don’t know why it’s not working in production. It’s an Ops problem now.”

Many of us have lived through a failed production deployment of an application at least once. And unfortunately for some, the memories from such failed deployments can haunt for the rest of our lives. But thanks to a relatively old technology (but gaining traction recently), such things could quickly become a thing of the past. Welcome containerization—or as most people know it—Docker containers.