Security

Azure Defender for DevOps – First Impressions

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The recent batch of high profile security incidents at various companies in Australia highlights the need for appropriate security measures across all components of an organisation’s infrastructure. Defender for DevOps is a new functional addon (in preview) to Defender for Cloud. It provides security functionality for your code respositories and associated components.

Setup

When navigating to the Defender for Cloud interface, a new option will appear under the “Cloud Security” heading.

The new DevOps Security option

Once we click on this, we are presented with an intro splash page with steps to getting started. The first step is to connect to the environments. Both Azure DevOps and Github repositories are supported environments.

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VMSA-2021-0020 – 19 vulnerabilities on vCenter

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VMware published a new security advisory overnight (VMSA-2021-0020) and it’s a big one. In total, it lists 19 vulnerabilities affecting multiple versions of vCenter. The most serious of the vulnerabilities is the first one – CVE-2021-22005. This vulnerability allows an attacker to upload files to vCenter. This vulnerability could then be used as an avenue to execute code. It’s been giving a CVSS score of 9.8

The second most worrying item on the list (CVE-2021-21991) allows an attacker to escalate their priveleges to Administrator level in the vSphere web interface. This vulnerability has been scored at 8.8.

The resolution for all these vulnerabilities is to update vCenter to the appropriate version. The advistory lists these, and I’ve produced a condensed version below.

Product/VersionUpdate ToNotes
vCenter 7.07.0 U2dThe majority of issues are fixed by going to U2c. U2d resolves CVE-2021-22011 and CVE-2021-22018
vCenter 6.76.7 U3oThis version will resolve all the associated issues with 6.7
vCenter 6.56.5 U3q This version will resolve all the associated issues with 6.5

Given the nature of some of these vulnerabilities, this would be one to get onto ASAP.

Remediating VMSA-2021-0002 – Potential Issues

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In late February, VMware published their second security advisory for 2021. It contained contained three items:

  • CVE-2021-21972 – A remote code execution vulnerability in vCenter that has a CVSS score of 9.8
  • CVE-2021-21974 – A vulnerablity in OpenSLP, which is used in ESXi. This one has a CVSS score of 8.8
  • CVE-2021-21973 – Another vCenter vulnerability that was rated with a CVSS score of 5.3

Given the product versions affected, most organisations with relatively up to date virtualisation infrastructure would be at risk from these items. While testing and simulating the update process, I ran into some issues that might be worth publishing for a broader audience.

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