Runecast Analyzer zeigt Schwachstellen auf

For several years now, Runecast Analyzer has been the go-to solution for finding misconfigurations and other known issues within IT infrastructure. It’s always been possible to find your exposure to a specific vulnerability if you know the details of the vulnerability in question – you can search for the VMSA or CVE reference number within the All Issues and Inventory views. However, the age-old challenge is that you don’t know what you don’t know, which is problematic. Bad actors don’t wait until you’re aware of a vulnerability before they try to exploit it. So the latest release of Runecast Analyzer now has a new Vulnerabilities view and a widget on the main dashboard to put this information front and centre. Let’s take a quick look.

From this view of the main dashboard, we can see that we have 39 vulnerabilities discovered across our environments. Let’s see what happens if we click through this.

Oh dear, a sea of red. It looks like we have some work to do to mitigate these. Note that we can filter for specific CVEs if we need to build reporting highlighting this information. If we’re interested in a particular VMSA, for example, we can search for that in the top right of the screen or the inventory view.

Also worth bearing in mind is that while VMware has historically bundled multiple CVEs into a single VMSA, Runecast Analyzer breaks these down into their constituent parts. For example, the recent VMSA-2021-0002 included CVEs for a plugin running on vCenter and a service running on ESXi hosts. These both require different approaches to mitigate, and we break them down as such.

As you can see, this new release puts vulnerabilities front and centre in the product, so you no longer need to know the CVE number and go searching – Runecast Analyzer surfaces this information for you!

New HCL Widget

One other thing that you might have noticed from the first screenshot is the new “HW Incompatible Hosts” widget. Again, the logic behind this is simple – sometimes things change in your environment, and we wanted to highlight when this might pose a problem for you.

While good sysadmins perform HCL checks always before a new deployment, and sometimes when upgrading, this check is only valid at that specific point in time. As you apply patches and updates, occasionally, hardware gets retired from the HCL. While it’s rare, sometimes hardware that was previously supported gets removed from the HCL due to bugs in firmware etc. The new Hardware Compatibility widget helps highlight when this kind of thing occurs, to know of potential problems before you start seeing strange performance issues and the like.

Here are some past instances of our rapid response time to reporting on and making VMSA and CVE checks available in Runecast Analyzer:

Critical VMware VMSA-2021-0010 Explained & Covered | May 26, 2021

Critical VMware VMSA-2021-0002 Explained & Covered | February 24, 2021

Critical VMware VMSA-2020-0026 Explained & Covered | November 20, 2020

Critical VMware VMSA-2020-0023. Explained & Covered | October 21, 2020

Newly-found ‘MDS’ the next Meltdown? Here’s how to stop it | November 20, 2019

‍Newly-found ‘MDS’ the next Meltdown? Here’s how to stop it | June 4, 2019

How to Fix L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) in VMware vSphere | August 16, 2018