PPT ON VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT

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Vulnerability Assessment  Presentation Transcript

1.Vulnerability Assessment

2.Introduction
Vulnerability: A flaw or weakness in system security procedures, design, implementation, or internal controls that may result in a security breach or a violation of the system's security policy.

Threat: The potential for a specific vulnerability to be exercised either intentionally or accidentally

Control: measures taken to prevent, detect, minimize, or eliminate risk to protect the Integrity, Confidentiality, and Availability of information.

Vulnerability Assessment: The process of identifying,  quantifying, and prioritizing (or ranking) the vulnerabilities in a system.

3. Vulnerability Assessment Basics
Vulnerability Assessment is a subset of Vulnerability Management
Proactive vs. reactive
Vulnerability assessment  vs. penetration testing
Examples of IT vulnerability assessments

4. Why Do Vulnerability Assessments?
System accreditation
Risk assessment
Network auditing
Provide direction for security controls
Can help justify resource expenditure
Can provide greater insight into process and architecture
Compliance checking
Continuous monitoring

5.Vulnerabilities
Where do they come from?

Flaws in software
Faulty configuration
Weak passwords
Human error
Inappropriately assigned permission levels
System inappropriately placed in infrastructure/environment
Vulnerabilities don’t go away by themselves

6.Best Practices
Establish chain of command/authority
Create official purpose and procedures
Decide on schedule
Build your reputation
Build relationships
Think in terms of risk
Document everything!
Know your environment
Be prepared

7.CERT Methodology
1) Setup

2) Test Execution

3) Vulnerability Analysis

4) Reporting

5) Remediation
Repeat!

8.Step 1: Setup
Begin documentation
Secure permission
Update tools
Configure tools

9.Step 2: Test Execution
Run the tools
Document as you go
Run a packet capture while running the assessment tools

10.Step 3: Vulnerability Analysis
Human interpretation is required to make results meaningful
That interpretation includes
Assessing risk presented by vulnerabilities
Comparing the results to security policy
Verifying vulnerabilities
Prioritizing vulnerabilities

11.Step 3: Vulnerability Analysis
Assessing risk and prioritizing vulnerabilities
A subjective process but you can be objective by using CVSS
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)
NIST provides a CVSS calculator at http://nvd.nist.gov/cvss.cfm?calculator
By adjusting the different values based on the characteristics of the vulnerability, the CVSS score will go either up or down depending  on the risk presented to your specific environment

12.Researching vulnerabilities
Without a CVE number
Google
Security Sites
Security email list archives http://seclists.org
Be careful who you get information from/trust
Best to go to a known good security site (e.g. sans.org)
CERIAS Cassandra service - https://cassandra.cerias.purdue.edu
Verify with a trusted source or multiple sources if possible

13.Causes of errors during vulnerability analysis
Environmental Issues
Timing Issues
Privilege Issues
Tool Issues
People/knowledge Issue

14.Error types
False Positive - Identifying a vulnerability that is not present
False Negative - Failing to identify the presence of a vulnerability
Error prevention
Use several different tools for verification
Examine the traffic generate by tools
Consult with the system owner/administrator

15.Goals
Present a meaningful summary of the vulnerabilities found
Prioritize and explain vulnerabilities
Provide possible remediation suggestions

16.Anatomy of a report
Header
Summary
List of vulnerabilities - For each vulnerability, at a minimum provide:
Unique tracking number
Risk level
High - Immediate action
Medium - Action required
Low - Action recommended
Brief description
Appendices - At a minimum the following two should be included
Vulnerability details
Assessment Setup

17.Step 4: Reporting
Metrics
Tracking progress of key metrics over time allows progress to be quantified
Also a good idea to tie metrics to cost savings
Examples:
Number of vulnerabilities found by criticality
Average number of vulnerabilities found
Number of vulnerabilities remediated
Time from vulnerability discovery to remediation
Time per assessment
Total assessments done

18.Best Practices
Standardization
Know your audience

Avoid fluff
Prioritize by risk
Track progress

19.Step 5: Remediation
Vulnerability remediation is the process of fixing vulnerabilities
Pick the issues you want to fix because you may not have enough resources to fix them all
Remediation choices
For every vulnerability there are three choices for remediation:
Fix - eliminate vulnerability altogether
Accept - the cost of fixing outweighs the risk
Mitigate - don't outright fix but use additional layers of security to lessen the risk presented by the vulnerability

20.Types of remediation
Manual
Pros - less likely to cause system problems
Cons - does not scale well, time consuming
Automatic remediation
Pros - scales very well
Cons - may cause system problems, may not actually remediate, potential for breaking something is greater
Manual - unique or critical system
Automatic - many similar items

21.Remediation Planning
Plan for remediating all vulnerabilities found in the system
Plan should include:
Whether to fix, mitigate or accept vulnerabilities
Whether to use automatic or manual remediation
Strategy to mitigate any remaining vulnerabilities
Justification for accepting any vulnerability

22.Test remediation on a dev instance before implementing on a production system
Verification
Cooperation required for successful remediation

Don’t forget change management
23. Tools used for Vulnerability Assessment
Acunetix Web Security Scanner
GFI LANguard
Nessus