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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:

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.

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:

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.

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