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What's new? Product updates from Intruder February 2024

Andy Hornegold
Author
Andy Hornegold
•
VP of Product
Updated
February 26, 2024
|
Published
February 5, 2024
|
min read

Key Points

Learn about Intruder’s attack surface management features, check out the improvements we're making to our AWS integration, and how we're enhancing our web app scanning capabilities to support single page applications!

Watch our video for the latest product updates:

Soon to be released

Loading... enhanced web app scanning

In 2023, we made a lot of progress with our web app scanning capabilities. We simplified the authentication workflow, and added the ability to authenticate a web app via a recorded login. This year, we've been working hard behind the scenes to improve the way we spider web apps, making web app scanning easier for our customers.

Later this month, you'll be able to scan single page applications with Intruder! Recorded logins allows us to access pages past single sign-on (SSO), while our enhanced spidering enables you to scan more comprehensively within your web apps. Enhanced web app scanning drops in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on your inbox.

Not an Intruder customer? Start your free trial today so you're ready to scan when it comes out.

Curious and want to learn more about single page applications? Read our blog about it here.

‍

Auto sync your cloud assets at the AWS organization level

We're improving our existing AWS integration by giving you the ability to add AWS accounts at the organization level, rather than having to do it individually. It makes things easier, saves you time, and increases your cloud coverage. You won't have to worry about any missing targets in your attack surface, as cloud assets in AWS are synced and added as targets in Intruder automatically.

Intruder customers will receive an email about the improvements to our AWS integration when we release them later this month.

‍

Feature spotlight - Attack Surface Management

Get visibility and control of your external attack surface. Here's a quick summary of how to manage your attack surface with Intruder:

  • Find more vulnerabilities with Nuclei (available to customers on the premium plan - find out more)
  • Manage your cloud assets easily by syncing Intruder with your AWS organisations
  • Connect your cloud environment with Intruder via Cloudbot, automatically pulling all your internet-facing assets into Intruder
  • Identify exactly what's exposed to the internet across your attack surface with network view

Curious about attack surface management at Intruder? Watch Andy, our VP of Product, talk about it in more detail in our product spotlight:

‍

‍

Want to learn more about attack surface management? Read this blog for a deep dive into attack surface management and how to find your assets before hackers do.

Read our attack surface management vs vulnerability management blog for more information about the differences between vulnerability management and attack surface management.

Existing customers can check out our attack surface management capabilities in portal here. New to Intruder? See it for yourself on our free trial.

What’s next on the roadmap?

Web application discovery - Smart recommendations

We're continuing our commitment to enhancing web app scanning this quarter and beyond in 2024! Part of that includes making it as easy as possible for customers to scan their web apps in Intruder. So, we're making it clear when you should add a web app with smart recommendations for you along the way, such as detecting a login page and recommending it be scanned as a web app.

API discovery within your AWS environment

One of our company values is to make vulnerability management easy - as such, we're working to make API scanning a little bit smoother. Currently, there are some customers who have added APIs as targets in Intruder but have not included the schema. So, we're making it super simple and easy for customers to add their schema by highlighting APIs we identify in your AWS environment.

Got some ideas?

Have something you want us to add to the roadmap? Get it in front of our product team by submitting a feature request here.

‍

Latest product tour and Q&A available on-demand

You can also watch our recent Office Hours: Product Tour and Q&A session that walks new users through the most important features available in the platform. Discover: 

  • Key features and how to get set up correctly to start scanning.
  • Tips to be as secure as possible.
  • 1:1 Q&A with Support.

New to Intruder? We help thousands of small companies stay safe every day. Why not try us free for 14 days?

‍

Get our free

Ultimate Guide to Vulnerability Scanning

Learn everything you need to get started with vulnerability scanning and how to get the most out of your chosen product with our free PDF guide.

Download now
Author
Andy Hornegold
,
VP of Product

Andy has a long career in cyber security including a decade in threat simulation and consulting. Career highlights include being the Assurance Regional Lead at one of the UK's leading cyber security consultancies and helping critical national infrastructure providers stay secure. Most recently, Andy was the EU Red Team Operations Lead at Mandiant, building out and leading the security team to deliver high quality intelligence-led threat simulations.

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back to BLOG

What's new? Product updates from Intruder February 2024

Andy Hornegold
February 5, 2024

Learn about Intruder’s attack surface management features, check out the improvements we're making to our AWS integration, and how we're enhancing our web app scanning capabilities to support single page applications!

Watch our video for the latest product updates:

Soon to be released

Loading... enhanced web app scanning

In 2023, we made a lot of progress with our web app scanning capabilities. We simplified the authentication workflow, and added the ability to authenticate a web app via a recorded login. This year, we've been working hard behind the scenes to improve the way we spider web apps, making web app scanning easier for our customers.

Later this month, you'll be able to scan single page applications with Intruder! Recorded logins allows us to access pages past single sign-on (SSO), while our enhanced spidering enables you to scan more comprehensively within your web apps. Enhanced web app scanning drops in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on your inbox.

Not an Intruder customer? Start your free trial today so you're ready to scan when it comes out.

Curious and want to learn more about single page applications? Read our blog about it here.

‍

Auto sync your cloud assets at the AWS organization level

We're improving our existing AWS integration by giving you the ability to add AWS accounts at the organization level, rather than having to do it individually. It makes things easier, saves you time, and increases your cloud coverage. You won't have to worry about any missing targets in your attack surface, as cloud assets in AWS are synced and added as targets in Intruder automatically.

Intruder customers will receive an email about the improvements to our AWS integration when we release them later this month.

‍

Feature spotlight - Attack Surface Management

Get visibility and control of your external attack surface. Here's a quick summary of how to manage your attack surface with Intruder:

  • Find more vulnerabilities with Nuclei (available to customers on the premium plan - find out more)
  • Manage your cloud assets easily by syncing Intruder with your AWS organisations
  • Connect your cloud environment with Intruder via Cloudbot, automatically pulling all your internet-facing assets into Intruder
  • Identify exactly what's exposed to the internet across your attack surface with network view

Curious about attack surface management at Intruder? Watch Andy, our VP of Product, talk about it in more detail in our product spotlight:

‍

‍

Want to learn more about attack surface management? Read this blog for a deep dive into attack surface management and how to find your assets before hackers do.

Read our attack surface management vs vulnerability management blog for more information about the differences between vulnerability management and attack surface management.

Existing customers can check out our attack surface management capabilities in portal here. New to Intruder? See it for yourself on our free trial.

What’s next on the roadmap?

Web application discovery - Smart recommendations

We're continuing our commitment to enhancing web app scanning this quarter and beyond in 2024! Part of that includes making it as easy as possible for customers to scan their web apps in Intruder. So, we're making it clear when you should add a web app with smart recommendations for you along the way, such as detecting a login page and recommending it be scanned as a web app.

API discovery within your AWS environment

One of our company values is to make vulnerability management easy - as such, we're working to make API scanning a little bit smoother. Currently, there are some customers who have added APIs as targets in Intruder but have not included the schema. So, we're making it super simple and easy for customers to add their schema by highlighting APIs we identify in your AWS environment.

Got some ideas?

Have something you want us to add to the roadmap? Get it in front of our product team by submitting a feature request here.

‍

Latest product tour and Q&A available on-demand

You can also watch our recent Office Hours: Product Tour and Q&A session that walks new users through the most important features available in the platform. Discover: 

  • Key features and how to get set up correctly to start scanning.
  • Tips to be as secure as possible.
  • 1:1 Q&A with Support.

New to Intruder? We help thousands of small companies stay safe every day. Why not try us free for 14 days?

‍

Release Date
Level of Ideal
Comments
Before CVE details are published
🥳
Limited public information is available about the vulnerability.

Red teamers, security researchers, detection engineers, threat actors have to actively research type of vulnerability, location in vulnerable software and build an associated exploit.

Tenable release checks for 47.43% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 32.96%.
Day of CVE publish
😊
Vulnerability information is publicly accessible.

Red teamers, security researchers, detection engineers and threat actors now have access to some of the information they were previously having to hunt themselves, speeding up potential exploit creation.

Tenable release checks for 17.12% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 17.69%.
First week since CVE publish
😐
Vulnerability information has been publicly available for up to 1 week.

The likelihood that exploitation in the wild is going to be happening is steadily increasing.

Tenable release checks for 10.9% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 20.69%.
Between 1 week and 1 month since CVE publish
🥺
Vulnerability information has been publicly available for up to 1 month, and some very clever people have had time to craft an exploit.

We’re starting to lose some of the benefit of rapid, automated vulnerability detection.

Tenable release checks for 9.58% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 12.43%.
After 1 month since CVE publish
😨
Information has been publicly available for more than 31 days.

Any detection released a month after the details are publicly available is decreasing in value for me.

Tenable release checks for 14.97% of the CVEs they cover over a month after the CVE details have been published, and Greenbone release 16.23%.

‍

With this information in mind, I wanted to check what is the delay for both Tenable and Greenbone to release a detection for their scanners. The following section will focus on vulnerabilities which:

  • Have CVSSv2 rating of 10
  • Are exploitable over the network
  • Require no user interaction

These are the ones where an attacker can point their exploit code at your vulnerable system and gain unauthorised access.

We’ve seen previously that Tenable have remote checks for 643 critical vulnerabilities, and OpenVAS have remote checks for 450 critical vulnerabilities. Tenable release remote checks for critical vulnerabilities within 1 month of the details being made public 58.4% of the time, but Greenbone release their checks within 1 month 76.8% of the time. So, even though OpenVAS has fewer checks for those critical vulnerabilities, you are more likely to get them within 1 month of the details being made public. Let’s break that down further.

In Figure 10 we can see the absolute number of remote checks released on a given day after a CVE for a critical vulnerability has been published. What you can immediately see is that both Tenable and OpenVAS release the majority of their checks on or before the CVE details are made public; Tenable have released checks for 247 CVEs, and OpenVAS have released checks for 144 CVEs. Then since 2010 Tenable have remote released checks for 147 critical CVEs and OpenVAS 79 critical CVEs on the same day as the vulnerability details were published. The number of vulnerabilities then drops off across the first week and drops further after 1 week, as we would hope for in an efficient time-to-release scenario.

Figure 10: Absolute numbers of critical CVEs with a remote check release date from the date a CVE is published

While raw numbers are good, Tenable have a larger number of checks available so it could be unfair to go on raw numbers alone. It’s potentially more important to understand the likelihood that OpenVAS or Tenable will release a check of a vulnerability on any given day after a CVE for a critical vulnerability is released. In Figure 11 we can see that Tenable release 61% their checks on or before the date that a CVE is published, and OpenVAS release a shade under 50% of their checks on or before the day that a CVE is published.

Figure 11: Percentage chance of delay for critical vulnerabilities

So, since 2010 Tenable has more frequently released their checks before or on the same day as the CVE details have been published for critical vulnerabilities. While Tenable is leading at this point, Greenbone’s community feed still gets a considerable percentage of their checks out on or before day 0.

I thought I’d go another step further and try and see if I could identify any trend in each organisations release delay, are they getting better year-on-year or are their releases getting later? In Figure 12 I’ve taken the mean delay for critical vulnerabilities per year and plotted them. The mean as a metric is particularly influenced by outliers in a data set, so I expected some wackiness and limited the mean to only checks released 180 days prior to a CVE being published and 31 days after a CVE being published. These seem to me like reasonable limits, as anything greater than 6 months prior to CVE details being released is potentially a quirk of the check details and anything after a 1-month delay is less important for us.

What can we take away from Figure 12?

  • We can see that between 2011 and 2014 Greenbone’s release delay was better than that of Tenable, by between 5 and 10 days.
  • In 2015 things reverse and for 3 years Tenable is considerably ahead of Greenbone by a matter of weeks.
  • But, then in 2019 things get much closer and Greenbone seem to be releasing on average about a day earlier than Tenable.
  • For both the trendline over an 11-year period is very close, with Tenable marginally beating Greenbone.
  • We have yet to have any data for 2021 for OpenVAS checks for critical show-stopper CVEs.
Figure 12: Release delay year-on-year (lower is better)

With the larger number of checks, and still being able to release a greater percentage of their remote checks for critical vulnerabilities Tenable could win this category. However, the delay time from 2019 and 2020 going to OpenVAS, and the trend lines being so close, I am going to declare this one a tie. It’s a tie.

The takeaway from this is that both vendors are getting their checks out the majority of the time either before the CVE details are published or on the day the details are published. This is overwhelmingly positive for both scanning solutions. Over time both also appear to be releasing remote checks for critical vulnerabilities more quickly.

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Written by

Andy Hornegold

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