MaxPatrol VM – vulnerability management at Positive Technologies

At Positive Technologies I was the CPO of the line that finds vulnerabilities before an attack: MaxPatrol VM, MaxPatrol HCC, MaxPatrol 8 and XSpider. In 2023 and 2024 these products brought the company more than 5 billion rubles a year, with a team of 200+ people working on them.

What the products are

• MaxPatrol VM is a vulnerability management system. It finds vulnerabilities in the infrastructure, ranks them by how dangerous they are for the business and tracks that they get fixed. Information about trending vulnerabilities, the ones attackers are using right now, reaches the product within 12 hours.
• MaxPatrol HCC is a module that checks system settings against security standards.
• MaxPatrol 8 and XSpider are the previous generation: a security compliance system and the vulnerability scanner the company's history started with.

Its place in the company

In 2024 MaxPatrol VM accounted for 19% of all Positive Technologies shipments, the second-largest share after MaxPatrol SIEM. This is in the annual results the company publishes for investors.

One of the releases

MaxPatrol VM 2.5 came out in June 2024:

• the product learned to assess the security of web applications and to find vulnerabilities in software running in Docker containers;
• infrastructure scanning became at least five times faster: up to 20 hosts are scanned at once instead of 4;
• you can add your own security requirements to the HCC module.

This is how I put the product's job at the time: "to make clients immune to attacks through 1-day vulnerabilities on the perimeter and in key and target systems".

Where I talked about it

• In the CyberDurshlag podcast, which I hosted with Pavel Popov: 21 episodes on vulnerability management (in Russian)
• In the talk "Trending vulnerabilities: how to tell you are not a colander" in September 2023 (in Russian)