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Omar Santos

Principal Engineer

Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) Security Research and Operations

Omar Santos is an active member of the cyber security community, where he leads several industry-wide initiatives and standards bodies. His active role helps businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to increasing the security of their critical infrastructures.

Omar is the author of more than twenty (20) books and video courses, as well as numerous white papers, articles, and security configuration guidelines and best practices. Omar is a principal engineer of the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT), where he mentors and leads engineers and incident managers during the investigation and resolution of cyber security vulnerabilities. Additional information about Omar's current projects can be found at this website, and you can follow Omar on Twitter: @santosomar

Articles

August 24, 2023

SECURITY

Akira Ransomware Targeting VPNs without Multi-Factor Authentication

Cisco has observed instances where threat actors appear to be targeting organizations that do not configure multi-factor authentication for their VPN users. This highlights the importance of enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) in VPN implementations.

April 18, 2023

SECURITY

Threat Actors Exploiting SNMP Vulnerabilities in Cisco Routers

Recent reports and threat intelligence indicate that cyber attackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in legacy Cisco routers and switches that have not been properly upgraded, configured, or updated with the latest software.

March 15, 2022

SECURITY

Cyber Actors Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication Implementations

A recent FBI flash bulletin described how cyber actors were able to use the PrintNightmare vulnerability (CVE-2021-34527) and bypass Duo 2FA to compromise an unpatched Windows machine and gain administrative privileges. This did NOT leverage or reveal a vulnerability in Duo.

April 29, 2019

SECURITY

The PSIRT Services Framework: Helping the Industry Protect the Ecosystem

At Cisco, our leadership made the decision over twenty four years ago that we would clearly publicly communicate security vulnerabilities or other issues that could potentially expose customers to risk....

April 22, 2019

SECURITY

Insights About the Global Internet Routing Table Reaching the 768k Milestone

Back in 2014, I wrote an article that highlighted that global Internet routing table passed the 512,000 or 512k route mark. Today we know that another significant milestone has been...

November 14, 2018

SECURITY

Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Veterans Day Serving Those Who Served

This week marks the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day and Veterans Day.  With veterans top of mind, Cisco today announced the expansion of CyberVetsUSA, a free cybersecurity training program...

June 22, 2018

SECURITY

Cisco PSIRT Notice About Public Exploitation of the Cisco ASA Web Services Denial of Service Vulnerability

With the security of our customers' networks being a top priority, we're actively raising awareness of a vulnerability affecting Cisco ASA Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software.

February 5, 2018

SECURITY

Understanding the Attack Vectors of CVE-2018-0101 – Cisco ASA Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service Vulnerabilit …

On January 29, 2018, the Cisco PSIRT published a security advisory about a remote code execution and denial of service vulnerability affecting the Cisco ASA and Cisco Next-Generation Firewall platforms.

October 16, 2017

SECURITY

Perspective About the Recent WPA Vulnerabilities (KRACK Attacks)

On October 16th,Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens, from the University of Leuven, published a paper disclosing a series of vulnerabilities that affect the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and the...