How it works

To be able to detect vulnerabilities, now agents are able to natively collect a list of installed applications, sending it periodically to the manager (where it is stored in local sqlite databases, one per agent). Also, the manager builds a global vulnerabilities database, using public CVE repositories, using it later to cross-correlate this information with the agent's applications inventory data.

The global vulnerabilities database is created automatically, currently pulling data from the following repositories:

• https://canonical.com: Used to pull CVEs for Ubuntu Linux distributions.

• https://access.redhat.com: Used to pull CVEs for Red Hat and CentOS Linux distributions.

• https://www.debian.org: Used to pull CVEs for Debian Linux distributions.

• https://nvd.nist.gov/: Used to pull CVEs from the National Vulnerability Database. Currently is only used to report Windows agents.

This database can be configured to be updated periodically, ensuring that the solution will check for the very latest CVEs.

Once the global vulnerability database (with the CVEs) is created, the detection process looks for vulnerable packages in the inventory databases (unique per agent). Alerts are generated when a CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) affects a package that is known to be installed in one of the monitored servers.

Since 3.11.0, the module is able to alert about known Windows vulnerabilities (indexed as CVEs as well) by detecting the installed security updates (hotfixes) of each monitored agent.