Qualys Cloud Platform 2.21 New Features

Pronamika Abraham

Last updated on: June 3, 2020

This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.21 includes new major releases of both Web Application Firewall and Web Application Scanning. The release also includes numerous updates and new features for AssetView, Cloud Agent, and Security Assessment Questionnaire as follows:

  • AssetView (Version 2.21.0) – One click access to vulnerability details for an asset and Improved filtering options for widgets.
  • Cloud Agent Platform (Version 2.2.0) – Additional tuning parameters for the agent and simplified agent OS support information.
  • Security Assessment Questionnaire (Version 2.6.0) – Improvements to Dynamic Reports, ability to customize Email templates, and ability to edit comments in responses.
  • Web Application Firewall (Version 2.0.0) – Improved virtual appliance, improved integration with Web Application Scanning, a revamped user-interface and simplified security configuration.
  • Web Application Scanning (Version 5.0.0) – Includes initial support for REST based testing, Scanner Appliance Pooling and drastic improvements to Progressive Scanning metrics.

The specific day for deployment will differ depending on the platform. Release Dates will be published on the Qualys Status page when available.

Highlights

AssetView

  • Widget Enhancements – Table, bar, and pie widgets now allow you to filter displayed results. This allows you to exclude data that may be irrelevant to the viewers of a dashboard such as filtering out results for test environments.
    av-image1
  • Vulnerability Details – You can now directly access the details of an individual detection with one click on “View Details” from the Vulnerabilities tab in the Asset Details window.
    av-image2

 

Cloud Agent Platform

  • Config Profile Delta Upload Interval value changes – You can now tune the network bandwidth utilization for an agent’s transmission of results back to the platform to reduce bandwidth usage or increase to provide faster updates of data to the platform. Existing profiles are not affected with this change, however, best practices recommend to lower the Delta Upload Interval.
  • Config Profile CPU Throttle value changes – Allows you more control over resource consumption for Linux/Mac agents. Customers that want to further reduce resource usage on their assets by spreading out the data collection times can increase the CPU Throttle setting to a higher value.
  • List of Cloud Agent Supported Operating Systems moved to Online Help – the Operating System versions supported by the Cloud Agent have been removed from the Cloud Agent Module’s Install Agent panel with a link to the listing of up-to-date supported versions in the Online Help making it easier to see exactly what OS versions are supported by the agent.

Security Assessment Questionnaire

  • Dynamic Reports – SAQ reports can now be customized and viewed online prior to downloading. Multiple filter and display options can be used for report customization.
  • Email Customization – Campaign emails can now be customized with custom text, logo, background color, and tokens.
  • Edit Questionnaire Comments – Users can now edit and remove comments for Questionnaires. For example, a responder can edit or remove their comments to their responses in the questionnaire.

Web Application Firewall

  • New WAF Virtual Appliance v1.3.0 – The WAF appliance contains updates on the WAF core-engine to support Custom Rules and enhancements on the proxy appliance, including load-balancing, application monitoring and SSL operations.
  • Revamped User-Interface – Easier to use UI with changes across the module.
  • Reusable Configuration Profiles – You can now reuse defined configuration modules across multiple web applications, simplifying the configuration management.
  • Built-in Security Policies – Built-in Security Policies allow you to deploy new applications within minutes. These predefined policies are for specific applications such as Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and Microsoft Outlook Web Application and are maintained by the Qualys Security Response Team.
  • WAF integration with WAS: ScanTrust – The ScanTrust feature allows WAS to scan a Web Application Asset through the WAF.
  • Custom Security Rules – Web applications often require security rules tailored to meet their specific security requirements. In addition to Event exceptions and WAS virtual patches, you can now create custom rules.
  • Load-Balancing of web servers – You can now load-balance your traffic between several backend web servers and supports application persistency and selectable load-balancing algorithms.
  • Health Checks to Monitor availability of web applications With Health Checks you can define monitoring intervals and expected responses allowing you to continuously monitor web application availability and state.

Note: All existing WAF customers will be automatically migrated to the latest WAF 2.0. Please note the following:

The HTTP Protocol, Declarative Security and Information Leakage sections of the previous Security Policy configuration will be consolidated under the new Protocols configuration.

New Custom Rules will be used for client source restrictions previously defined under the Control Rules section of the Security Policy. All existing control rules will be automatically mapped to new custom rules.

Previous versions of the WAF appliances will be compatible with the new WAF configuration, but an upgrade to v1.3.0 will be required to take advantage of the new features.

Web Application Scanning

  • REST based assessment – This initial phase of support for scanning REST based services will greatly benefit all customers’ ability to scan their APIs and can aid in mobile application security as a whole for their organization.
  • Scanner Appliance Pooling – Scanner Appliance Pooling will increase the amount of resources customers can assign to scans or groups of scans, therefore lowering the overall testing time for their web application scanning processes.
  • Progressive Scanning metrics – With the additional support of feedback metrics, users will now be able to greater understand scan progressions and coverage with visual indicators of what phase of progression their scans are running and have completed.

Full Release Notes are available here:

portal-221-release-notes-final

Show Comments (3)

Comments

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  1. No changes/improvements to the VM module? I’ve got outstanding Feature Requests that are well over a year old and will greatly improve efficiency, yet they are never considered?

  2. This release updates back-end components of Qualys Suite that don’t relate to Qualys VM, so that is why there are no VM features. Releases that update back-end components of Qualys Suite that *do* relate to VM typically have new VM features, for example https://qreleasenotes.wpengine.com/technology/2016/12/02/qualys-cloud-suite-8-9-1-new-features

    Qualys considers feature requests from customers, but we are not always able to implement them. I am asking your TAM to reach out to you about the requests you have made.

  3. The release notes have not been published yet, I would like to see if there are any small changes being made to WAS that would improve support for our applications.