CSIRT

January 15, 2020

SECURITY

Disk Image Deception

11 min read

Cisco's Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) detected a large and ongoing malspam campaign leveraging the .IMG file extension to bypass automated malware analysis tools and infect machines with a variety of Remote Access Trojans. During our investigation, we observed multiple tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that defenders can monitor for in their environments. Our incident response and security monitoring team's analysis on a suspicious phishing attack uncovered some helpful improvements in our detection capabilities and timing.

August 7, 2017

SECURITY

Open Source Threat Intel: GOSINT

2 min read

It’s our pleasure to announce the public availability of GOSINT – the open source intelligence gathering and processing framework. GOSINT allows a security analyst to collect and standardize structured and unstructured threat intelligence. Applying threat intelligence to security operations enriches alert data with additional confidence, context, and co-occurrence. This means that you are applying research […]

November 7, 2016

SECURITY

Is Your Race to SOC Headed for an Epic Crash?

4 min read

Before You Take Off, Get Up To Speed on These Six Precursors to Incident Response It seems most advice on setting up a Security Operations Center (SOC), or creating a Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), focuses on people, technology or processes. Unfortunately, such advice may also include doing so at full speed, from the […]

October 18, 2016

SECURITY

On or Off the Clock, Staying Cyber Secure is a New Fact of Life

4 min read

On or Off the Clock, Staying Cyber Secure is a New Fact of Life  Cybersecurity has always been a major concern for workplace networks. But, increasingly, it is top of...

July 25, 2016

SECURITY

Cognitive Bias in Incident Response

5 min read

This blog is a co-authored by Jeff Bollinger & Gavin Reid Are You Too Confident in Your Incident Response? When Charles Darwin stated “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge,” civilization’s evolution from Industrial Age to Information Age was nearly a century away. Yet, when it comes to many aspects of IT, he nailed […]

July 6, 2016

SECURITY

NetFlow AND PCAP (not or)

2 min read

As digital transformation sweeps across the world, there is a driving need for more effective logging and data recording for incident response. In today’s IT world, your agency’s Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) must have the capability to quickly determine the source and scope of an attack on its network in order to effectively mitigate […]

June 9, 2016

SECURITY

Detection in Depth

2 min read

Defense in depth is a well understood and widely implemented approach that can better secure your organization’s network. It works by placing multiple layers of defense throughout the network to create a series of overlapping and redundant defenses. If one layer fails, there will still be other defenses that remain intact. However, a lesser known […]

May 18, 2015

SECURITY

Trojanized PuTTY Software

4 min read

This post was authored by Cisco CSIRT’s Robert Semans, Brandon Enright, James Sheppard, and Matt Healy. In late 2013­­­–early 2014, a compromised FTP client dubbed “StealZilla,” based off the open source FileZilla FTP client was discovered. The attackers modified a few lines of code, recompiled the program, and disbursed the trojanized version on compromised web […]

April 10, 2014

SECURITY

March 2014 Threat Metrics

2 min read

The median rate of web malware encounters in March 2014 was 1:260, compared to a median rate of 1:341 requests in February. At least some of this increased risk appears to have been a result of interest in the NCAA tournaments (aka March Madness), which kicked off during the second week of March in the […]