What's new? Product updates from Intruder July 2023
Drata and Azure DevOps integrations are live, security advisories are now tracked in the portal and there are some impressive enhancements for you to try. Watch our video for the latest product updates:
More information: Q2 releases and enhancements
- Send reports directly from Intruder to Drata in 1-click. Learn about our partnership with Drata here or follow these instructions to get started right away.
- Create work items with the Azure DevOps integration. Learn how to get yourself set up here.
- Scan closer to home, and faster, by choosing a scanner in your region.
Just released
See, track and retest security advisories in the portal.
For our vanguard and premium customers who used to receive their advisories via email, you can now track them in the portal and have them included in reports!
Advisories are issues discovered and investigated by Intruder's security team. When a member of the security team detects an issue, it will be published in the portal for you to review. Once you have remediated the issue, you can then hit the retest button and the team will check whether you've successfully fixed the issue.
Make decisions faster with these two new dashboard features.
Our new widget on the dashboard helps you prioritize which issue to fix first, highlighting issues with the highest level severity open for the longest period of time. By fixing this issue, you'll see the most impact in improving your cyber hygiene score!
Generate a point in time report of all your targets and their associated issues used to be a bit difficult. Download a PDF or CSV report of the latest issues for all your targets with a click of a button directly from the dashboard.
*Coming soon* Check your fixes faster with remediation scans.
It will be faster to verify whether your remediation efforts have been successful. Instead of doing a full scan of an entire target, run a remediation scan to quickly check if you’ve fixed specific issues.
API security: how basic failings cause breaches
In case you missed Infosecurity Europe 2023 last week, here’s the summary of our talk on API Security: How Basic Failings Cause Breaches. Including our API tips:
- Visibility: make sure you know what's there
- Maintain defense in-depth
- Perfect is the enemy of good – start now!
- Look at the big picture (i.e not just your APIs)
- Document all the things
- Monitor: make it continuous (24/7)
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.
We help thousands of small companies stay safe every day. Why not try us free for 14 days?
- Intro
- Raw CVE Coverage
- Risk Rating Coverage
- Remote Check Types
- Check Publication Lead Time
- Local/Authenticated vs Remote Check Prioritisation
- Software Vendor & Package Coverage
- Headline Vulnerabilities of 2021 Coverage
- Conclusion
- Analysis Decisions
- TL;DR
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%.
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%.
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%.
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%.
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.

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.

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.

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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