I'm working on an automated security audit system which analyses custom Ubuntu installations to check for packages affected by security vulnerabilities. Since these machines are not connected to the internet I cannot simple run apt-get, and we need to keep the upgrades as small as possible so only updating packages when they are actually needed.
Part of this process is to monitor the Ubuntu Security Notices (USN) for new reports and extract information. However, I can't find a way to easily access all of the historical USN notices.
There is an RSS feed linked on http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/ but it only returns the most recent 50 reports, which won't work as I'm dealing with older Ubuntu versions and need to check historical reports.
The two options I can see, neither of which are nice, are to scrape the email archives or scrape the website. But I'd rather avoid doing these if possible…
Any ideas?
Best Answer
No, there is no API, but it should be fairly easy to create one by scraping the main CVE or partner CVE list into a db, instead of the USN website or email archive: