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What's new? Product updates from Intruder November 2023

Andy Hornegold
Author
Andy Hornegold
VP of Product

Key Points

Intruder’s list of compliance partners grows, we've made it easier to verify your web app authentications, and launched a new analytics tab! Watch our video for the latest product updates:

Just released

Simplified authentication setup

We’ve simplified the process of verifying if an authentication for a web app has been set up correctly before kicking off a scan. If you add an authentication to a web app in Intruder, you’ll notice we’ve added a verification step where we test the login details you provide to make sure the authentication has been successful. 

This feature was widely requested across the Intruder customer base, and saves users a lot of time and effort, as you get immediate feedback on whether or not the set up has worked without having to do a scan first to find out.

Want to watch a video showing how the process works the end-to-end? Get the full details of the release here.

Introducing our newest compliance partner... Vanta!

We've partnered with Vanta, the compliance and security platform, to further automate vulnerability management compliance. Now, you can send evidence of vulnerability scanning from Intruder directly into Vanta without any heavy lifting. We've broken down how our newest integration works in detail here.

*Coming soon* You won’t even have to click a button, you’ll be able to set up your scans to automatically send evidence to Vanta or Drata!

Feature spotlight - Analytics

Analyse your cyber security posture over time with our new analytics tab. Here's a quick summary of what you can do with analytics:

  • Filter data by time, tag, or target
  • Prioritize issues by severity
  • Track open, new, and fixed issues - and see how long it takes to resolve them
  • Monitor your cyber hygiene score
  • Find new vulnerabilities as they emerge with Emerging threat scans (ETS)
  • Manage your attack surface as it expands or contracts

Curious about the kinds of metrics you can see in analytics? Read our vulnerability management metrics blog here.

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

Or watch Andy, our VP of Product, talking about analytics below:

What’s next on the roadmap?

Enhanced vulnerability scanning with Nuclei

One of our core strengths at Intruder is continuous vulnerability scanning, and we're always on the lookout for powerful new scanners. 

That's why we're adding Nuclei scanner. Nuclei is a fast, customizable vulnerability scanner designed to probe modern applications, infrastructure, cloud platforms and networks. 

Tenable and Nuclei will be working side-by-side to make sure you’re getting as much attack surface coverage as possible. But don’t worry, Intruder will still filter out the noise so that you can work on what matters to you most.

Support for Single Page Application Scanning

You've asked and we listened! The ability to effectively scan Single Page Applications (SPAs) has been a long requested feature, and you will soon have it! With this release, you'll be able to:

  • Record your login process as you would normally within your browser, simplifying the verification process even further.
  • Scan more than just traditional, multi-page applications - scan for vulnerabilities within your single page apps too.

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 and tricks 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?

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Intruder’s new analytics tab, verifying that authenticated web apps have been setup correctly is now much easier, and a new compliance integration!
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What's new? Product updates from Intruder November 2023

Andy Hornegold

Intruder’s list of compliance partners grows, we've made it easier to verify your web app authentications, and launched a new analytics tab! Watch our video for the latest product updates:

Just released

Simplified authentication setup

We’ve simplified the process of verifying if an authentication for a web app has been set up correctly before kicking off a scan. If you add an authentication to a web app in Intruder, you’ll notice we’ve added a verification step where we test the login details you provide to make sure the authentication has been successful. 

This feature was widely requested across the Intruder customer base, and saves users a lot of time and effort, as you get immediate feedback on whether or not the set up has worked without having to do a scan first to find out.

Want to watch a video showing how the process works the end-to-end? Get the full details of the release here.

Introducing our newest compliance partner... Vanta!

We've partnered with Vanta, the compliance and security platform, to further automate vulnerability management compliance. Now, you can send evidence of vulnerability scanning from Intruder directly into Vanta without any heavy lifting. We've broken down how our newest integration works in detail here.

*Coming soon* You won’t even have to click a button, you’ll be able to set up your scans to automatically send evidence to Vanta or Drata!

Feature spotlight - Analytics

Analyse your cyber security posture over time with our new analytics tab. Here's a quick summary of what you can do with analytics:

  • Filter data by time, tag, or target
  • Prioritize issues by severity
  • Track open, new, and fixed issues - and see how long it takes to resolve them
  • Monitor your cyber hygiene score
  • Find new vulnerabilities as they emerge with Emerging threat scans (ETS)
  • Manage your attack surface as it expands or contracts

Curious about the kinds of metrics you can see in analytics? Read our vulnerability management metrics blog here.

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

Or watch Andy, our VP of Product, talking about analytics below:

What’s next on the roadmap?

Enhanced vulnerability scanning with Nuclei

One of our core strengths at Intruder is continuous vulnerability scanning, and we're always on the lookout for powerful new scanners. 

That's why we're adding Nuclei scanner. Nuclei is a fast, customizable vulnerability scanner designed to probe modern applications, infrastructure, cloud platforms and networks. 

Tenable and Nuclei will be working side-by-side to make sure you’re getting as much attack surface coverage as possible. But don’t worry, Intruder will still filter out the noise so that you can work on what matters to you most.

Support for Single Page Application Scanning

You've asked and we listened! The ability to effectively scan Single Page Applications (SPAs) has been a long requested feature, and you will soon have it! With this release, you'll be able to:

  • Record your login process as you would normally within your browser, simplifying the verification process even further.
  • Scan more than just traditional, multi-page applications - scan for vulnerabilities within your single page apps too.

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 and tricks 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.

Written by

Andy Hornegold

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