Paul Asadoorian

As founder and CEO of Security Weekly, Paul remains one of the world’s foremost experts on all things cybersecurity. Security Weekly is a one-stop resource for podcasts, webcasts and other content, informing community members about penetration testing, vulnerability analysis, ethical hacking and embedded device testing. Previously, Paul served as a lead IT security specialist for Brown University, and as an instructor with The SANS Institute.

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Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 77

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 77 Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist, Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher, and Ron Gula, Tenable CEO/CTO Announcements Preventing & Detecting Malware: A Multifaceted Approach Tenable Releases New SCADA Plugins Tenable All-Star Security Showcase - San Francisco 2011 Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials. We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable web site for more information about open positions. 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 product and company announcements, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more! Stories

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Preventing & Detecting Malware: A Multifaceted Approach

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Successful Attacks from Automated Malware Recently, malware dubbed "LizaMoon" (named after the first web site found distributing it) has been popping up in the news: Dubbed LizaMoon, unidentified perpetrators of the scareware campaign inject script into legitimate URLs, so when people try to access the website, they get redirected to a page warning them that their PCs are infected with malware that can be removed by downloading a free AV application called Windows Stability Center. From LizaMoon SQL Injection Attack Hits Websites LizaMoon scans web sites for easily exploitable SQL injection vulnerabilities, then uses that to put redirects on the web site that take users to a site which installs malware. This is not a new form of attack, however the "Lizamoon" malware has been surprisingly successful. Google searches for infected sites report that over 1.5 million pages have been infected. The important thing to not about the numbers of infection is "pages" does not refer to sites, as a site can have multiple infected pages. This type of attack typically works as follows:

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Announcing Nessus On Demand Training

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Tenable is pleased to announce the availability of the Nessus On Demand training. Below is a short "FAQ": What is On Demand training and how does it work? - The On Demand training represents training content, slides and audio that you can take anytime you like. Marcus Ranum (and the Tenable training team) has narrated nearly 20 hours of training material and lab exercises. This also includes full access to the online labs associated with the Nessus course. What products are currently being offered via On Demand? - Currently the "Nessus Vulnerability & Compliance Auditing" course is available On Demand and covers all aspects of using Nessus, including network vulnerability scans, authenticated patch auditing, configuration auditing and introducing the Nessus API and NASL scripting.

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Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 76

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 76 Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist, Marcus Ranum, Tenable's CSO and Dave Poynter, Tenable Training Team Announcements One new blog post has been published this week: APT - There.. I Said It. Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials. We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable web site for more information about open positions. 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 product and company announcements, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more! Marcus Ranum Interview Marcus comes on the show to discuss risk management pitfalls, "APT" and more!

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APT - There.. I Said It.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Recently I attended the Secure World Boston conference to sit in on a panel with industry experts about APT (Advanced Persistent Threat, for a great write-up on the definition see Richard Bejtlich's article titled, "What Is APT and What Does It Want?"). Following are some of my thoughts on the topic: Is APT something that everyone should be worrying about and planning for (is APT pervasive or just hype)? – APT is a new buzzword, but of course such threats have been around as long as there have been computer networks. It makes me think back Clifford Stoll’s book titled “The Cuckoos Egg”. I love Cliff’s analogy of “jiggling” the keys over the communications lines to disrupt the attackers just enough, but still give them enough access to keep an eye on them. Explain how APT works (reconnaissance, phishing, infection, exfiltration)? – The recon phase is the toughest to defend against and the most important phase to an attacker. Pre-texting is so important, yet much of the information has to be public and it’s tough to detect when someone is doing recon. This may turn into targeted phishing attacks, which are increasingly more successful. No matter how hard we try, we can’t educate all our users and expect them to catch 100% of the attacks - we have to rely on technology and training to ward off these attacks. Inevitably, people get into our systems and we need to have measures to detect unauthorized access to our systems. It’s presumptuous to think that your organization will never have a breach.

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Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 75

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 75 Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist & Dennis Brown, Research Engineer and "Malware Aficionado" Announcements Several new blog posts have been published this week, including: Mid-Atlantic CCDC - Lessons Learned in Communication Botnet Reputation and Content Scanning in Nessus Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials. We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable web site for more information about open positions. 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, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more! Stories Hacker gets Microsoft Kinect to work with Sony Playstation 3

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Mid-Atlantic CCDC - Lessons Learned in Communication

Thursday, March 17, 2011

The CCDC 2011 The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) is always a fantastic and educational event, and this year was no exception. Hundreds of people converged to share ideas, learn how to hack, learn how to defend and talk about security. Below is a brief summary of the happenings at the event: The Attackers - Many of the same people as previous years filled the role of the "hackers". They did a great job this year and showed how much they've learned over the years. The big takeaway from the Red Team is sharing. Using a new tool called "Armitage", they were able to share shell access to the Blue Team hosts, proving that sharing truly is caring. The Defenders - By design, the Blue teams are put at a disadvantage. This is meant to emulate the real world, where attackers have vast resources and often stay a step ahead. However, the Blue teams were very creative, employing reverse sabotage by leaving pieces of paper around the event with usernames and passwords written on them, which were completely fake. The Red Team was able to re-configure the Blue Team's phones and leave them messages on the display, a digital "love note" if you will. Phones for the Blue Team were ringing throughout the event, playing random WAV files from a server as well.

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Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 74

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 74 Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist, Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher and Ron Gula, Tenable CEO/CTO Announcements Several new blog posts have been published this week, including: Microsoft Patch Tuesday Roundup - March 2011 Leveraging Wake-On-LAN Support to Audit Powered-Off Hosts with Nessus Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials. We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable web site for more information about open positions. 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, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more! Stories Penetration Testing Execution Standard - A group has been formed to define what a penetration test really is and means. Several standards and compliance documents reference a "penetration test", but yet no one has really taken the time to define it. Carlos and I are involved with this effort, myself on the vulnerability scanning portion and Carlos on the post-exploitation side.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday Roundup - March 2011

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Another Microsoft Patch Tuesday is upon us. This month I was surprised that two vulnerabilities making headlines recently were not included in this Microsoft Patch Tuesday, namely the 0-day Windows SMB Vulnerability and the reported “Pwn2Own” IE vulnerability. The best way to remediate any vulnerability is to apply a patch provided by the vendor, and it’s puzzling why Microsoft is delaying the release of patches for these widely publicized vulnerabilities. To further aid in your efforts to evaluate the exposures presented by the vulnerabilities addressed by Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, Tenable's Research team has published Nessus plugins for each of the security bulletins issued this month: MS11-015 - Vulnerabilities in Windows Media Could Allow Remote Code Execution - Nessus Plugin ID 52583 (Credentialed Check)

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Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 73

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 73 Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist, Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher and Ron Gula, Tenable CEO/CTO Announcements Several new blog posts have been published this week, including: Agentless FDCC, USGCB and CyberScope Reporting Webinar - March 23 2:00 PM EST Event Analysis: Detecting Compromises, Javascript, Backdoors, and more! The Nessus Port Scanning Engine: An Inside Look Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials. We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable web site for more information about open positions. 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, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more! Stories Outbound SSH Traffic from HP Blade Servers - In this case it appears to be a bug, but what if it wasn't? I believe we need to keep close tabs on network connections in our environment. I'm a huge fan of Netflow analysis, largely because if you are attacking anything on the network, you need to make a connection. It's a difficult thing to get around (provided you do not have physical access to a medium that is not being monitored, such as 3G or some other wireless protocol). Also, it raises a scary situation where devices are pre-owned, meaning that during the manufacturing process attackers placed backdoors on the systems. Network monitoring can help identify these channels. For example, you should be able to spot your networking gear's management interfaces attempting to make connections out to the Internet.

Paul Asadoorian

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