Web Services Report

Web services are more common than ever before and continue to expand. The limiting factor, however, is security. Tenable.io identifies a wide range of web services running on any host and their associated vulnerabilities. This report provides multiple matrices for a high-level look at those vulnerabilities and the level of cyber risk associated with running web services.

Web services, also known as "service-oriented architecture" or SOA's, are universal services that are highly utilized due to their interoperability and standardized protocols.  Web services use standard protocols for exchanging data between applications or systems. Software applications written in various programming languages and running on various platforms can use web services to exchange data over a network or the internet. With the availability for high customization of web-services through multiple protocols and programming capability comes a significant increase in cyber risk.  Most web services communicate over HTTP and are, essentially, still web applications.  Operating on the same structure as web applications, web services possess the same vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows, XML injections, and session hijacking.

While monitoring the organization's assets, security risk managers and technicians use this report to discover and identify web services deployed on an asset. Information gathered in this report provides the risk manager with a high-level view of the running services' current state of vulnerabilities.  This information provides a roadmap for management to prioritize higher CVSS rated vulnerabilities for mitigation and faster reduction of cyber risk.   

Cyber Exposure provides a discipline and a process for managing and measuring cyber risk against the modern attack surface. This discipline synergizes not just SOC and IT teams, but all levels of security, to understand and collaborate more effectively while efficiently identifying and reducing the attack surface. Cyber Exposure transforms security monitoring from a static or fragmented view to live and continuous visibility across every asset on every platform. Tenable.io, the first Cyber Exposure technology, provides the data, visualization, process management and metrics needed to drive a new way to manage security to reduce cyber risk.

This report contains the following elements:

Web Server Vulnerabilities by Plugin Family: This table checks for vulnerabilities associated with web services grouped by plugin family.  Vulnerabilities for each plugin family are broken down by low, medium, high, and critical severities. There is an additional column that shows the number vulnerabilities for web services within those plugin families that have public exploits available.  These vulnerabilities can be exploited by publically available tools and should be remediated as soon as possible. 

Web Services Vulnerabilities by Port:  This matrix checks for vulnerabilities in web services associated with the common ports of the respective web service. Vulnerabilities for each web service are broken down by low, medium, high, and critical severities. There is an additional column that shows the number vulnerabilities that have public exploits available by web service. These vulnerabilities can be exploited by publically available tools and should be remediated as soon as possible. 

SSL Plugins Indicator:  All the plugins that refer to SSL or certificates are grouped into these indicators. An indicator is not highlighted if no matches are found; however, if a match is found, the color changes. If all the plugins applied to the indicator have a severity of info or low, then the indicator turns blue. If any of the selected plugin severities are medium, high, or critical, the color of the indicator changes to yellow, orange, or red, accordingly. However, if there is a mix of info, low, medium, and high severities, the indicator is purple. Indicators with a critical severity plugin are always red.

Web Services Indicator: This matrix covers a wide variety of web services and platforms that could be present in the environment. The matrix cell changes to purple if a vulnerability is present for the corresponding service or platform. Administrators and analysts may not have known about these web services in the environment. With this component providing actionable information about the vulnerabilities, analysts can help reduce risk in the environment.