Propeller-heads Unite!

Since I run a lot of Drupal and Moodle servers, it’s a good idea to keep up to date on all the published vulnerabilities. I’d really prefer to have some tool that lets me know when a new vulnerability is found, so I don’t have to keep checking back at a bunch of different web sites on the off chance a new vulnerability has been found. Fortunately, the Department of Homeland Security has an excellent site that provides RSS feeds of the vulnerabilities in their database. Handy, but a serious case of information overload since the feeds cover everything in their database.

Hmm. Distinctly suboptimal. Perhaps this is a good time to play with Yahoo Pipes? I’d looked at it before, but had never gotten around to actually building a pipe. This seems like a nice simple thing to try.

1. Log into pipes.yahoo.com and create a new pipe.
2. Grab the RSS feed one wishes to work with. In my case, I grabbed the feed for all analyzed vulnerabilities: http://nvd.nist.gov/download/nvd-rss-analyzed.xml
3. Drag “Fetch Feed” from the “Sources” section of the left sidebar into the workspace and enter the feed URL.
4. Drag “Filter” from the “Operators” section into the workspace and connect the two objects.
5. As soon as the feed and the filter are connected, the rules item list is populated with all the fields available in the feed. Select the ones you want to filter on - item.description and item.title in my case - and add the filter criteria.
6. Connect the filter object to the pipe output object and watch the results show up in the debugger. If they look good, save the pipe and click “run pipe” at the top of the screen.
7. When the pipe is run, it spits out a nice preview of the contents along with buttons to grab the output in various formats including JSON and RSS.

Oh, my. That was easy. Now I have a feed that provides me with a listing of all analyzed vulnerabilities right at the top of my Google Reader subscriptions. I guess that means I need to take off the training wheels and do something a bit more challenging, eh?