In 2016, the National Cyber Security Centre started an initiative called i100 (Industry 100), a collaborative program to secure and identify many critical vulnerabilities. This reduces the impact of Cyber attacks.
It’s a program to bring all the diverse and intelligent minds from various organisations to create a secure environment on cyberspace. This made a list of 100’s of public and private sector join together in an attempt to test innovative ideas with challenging thoughts.
The UK government’s authority has also posted,
“Under Industry 100, we are bringing industry and government expertise together in a way that helps us all learn lessons, identify systemic vulnerabilities and reduce the future impact of cyber attacks.”
After Several researches, the i100 and the NCSC now released information about Scanning Made Easy (SME), a collection of NMAP Scripting Engine.
Following Vulnerability Disclosure
Finding the exploit code and proof of concept for a software vulnerability has been easier than finding tools to defend it. Even with the scanning scripts, the results of the scans are not reliable. NCSC claims that SME was created to rectify this problem and to help network security defenders to find vulnerable systems and secure them.
As posted on NCSC, “Providing a false sense of security, or false positives, doesn’t help make your systems safer, as you won’t be fixing the real security issues. This is why SME scripts are written using the NMAP Scripting Engine (NSE).”
Guidelines of SME
The scripts that are built on SME were written by the i100 partners and a developer guideline is also made which provides the guide on what should and should not be done. Every script has a summary which describes how it verifies the vulnerabilities. Since the script syntax is easy to read, people who are using it can easily understand what it does.
“The first SME script we’re releasing scans for are Exim message transfer agent (MTA) remote code execution vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-28017 through CVE-2020-28026, also known as 21Nails). Visit Github to download/view the script.” – NCSC
The scripts contains
- How it checks vulnerability presence
- Why the check is unintrusive
- Why there might be false positives
- Why there might be false negatives
The scripts also include a description of the vulnerability along with the vendor security advisory links.
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