Exploit

March 23, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

How Malformed RTF Defeats Security Engines

1 min read

This post is authored by Paul Rascagneres with contributions from Alex McDonnell Executive Summary Talos has discovered a new spam campaign used to infect targets with the well known  Loki Bot stealer. The infection vector is an RTF document abusing an old exploit (CVE-2012-1856), however the most interesting part is the effort put into the […]

October 19, 2016

SECURITY

Malicious Microsoft Office Documents Move Beyond InkPicture

3 min read

In late August we began to detect malicious Microsoft Word documents that contained VisualBasic (VB) macro code and the code appeared to be triggering when the document was opened. However, the documents did not contain any of the standard events used to launch VB macro code when a document is opened, including Document_Open, or Auto_Open events. Upon […]

August 17, 2016

SECURITY

The Shadow Brokers EPICBANANA and EXTRABACON Exploits

10 min read

UPDATE April 20, 2017 Cisco continues to evaluate potential implications of the activities and information posted publicly by the Shadow Brokers Group.  We launched an investigation to analyze the new files posted on April 14th, 2017, and so far have not found any new vulnerabilities or exploits that affect Cisco products and services. Cisco PSIRT will […]

March 9, 2015

SECURITY

Mitigations Available for the DRAM Row Hammer Vulnerability

4 min read

This blog post was authored by Troy Fridley and Omar Santos of Cisco PSIRT. On Mar 9 2015, the Project Zero team at Google revealed findings from new research related to the known issue in the DDR3 Memory specification referred to as “Row Hammer”. Row Hammer is an industry-wide issue that has been discussed publicly […]

December 15, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Ancient Mac Site Harbors Botnet that Exploits IE Vulnerability

6 min read

This post was authored by Alex Chiu and Shaun Hurley. Last month, Microsoft released a security bulletin to patch CVE-2014-6332, a vulnerability within Windows Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) that could result in remote code execution if a user views a maliciously crafted web page with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Since then, there have been several […]

June 5, 2014

SECURITY

RIG Exploit Kit Strikes Oil

8 min read

This post was co-authored by Levi Gundert with contributions from Emmanuel Tacheau and Joel Esler. In the last month we have observed high levels of traffic consistent with the new “RIG” exploit kit (EK), as identified by Kahu Security. This new EK reportedly began being advertised on criminal forums in April, which coincides with when […]

May 19, 2014

SECURITY

Angling for Silverlight Exploits

6 min read

This post is co-authored by Andrew Tsonchev, Jaeson Schultz, Alex Chiu, Seth Hanford, Craig Williams, Steven Poulson, and Joel Esler. Special thanks to co-author Brandon Stultz for the exploit reverse engineering.  Silverlight exploits are the drive-by flavor of the month. Exploit Kit (EK) owners are adding Silverlight to their update releases, and since April 23rd we have […]

April 15, 2014

SECURITY

Year-Long Exploit Pack Traffic Campaign Surges After Leveraging CDN

7 min read

Anyone can purchase an exploit pack (EP) license or rent time on an existing EP server. The challenge for threat actors is to redirect unsuspecting web browsing victims by force to the exploit landing page with sustained frequency. Naturally, like most criminal services in the underground, the dark art of traffic generation is a niche specialty that must be purchased to ensure drive-by campaign success. For the past year we have been tracking a threat actor (group) that compromises legitimate websites and redirects victims to EP landing pages. Over the past three months we observed the same actor using malvertising - leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs) to facilitate increased victim redirection - as part of larger exploit pack campaigns.

January 23, 2014

SECURITY

Fiesta Exploit Pack is No Party for Drive-By Victims

5 min read

This post was also authored by Andrew Tsonchev and Steven Poulson. Update 2014-05-26: Thank you to Fox-IT for providing the Fiesta logo image. We updated the caption to accurately reflect image attribution. Cisco’s Cloud Web Security (CWS) service provides TRAC researchers with a constant fire hose of malicious insight and now that we are collaborating with Sourcefire’s Vulnerability Research […]