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Microsoft Patch Tuesday – September 2017

Microsoft has released its monthly set of security advisories for vulnerabilities that have been identified and addressed in various products. This month’s advisory release addresses 81 new vulnerabilities with 27 of them rated critical, 52 rated important, and 2 rated moderate. These vulnerabilities impact Edge, Hyper-V, Internet Explorer, Office, Remote Desktop Protocol, Sharepoint, Windows Graphic […]

September 12, 2017 • 1 min read
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Vulnerability Spotlight: TALOS-2017-0430/0431: Multiple Vulnerabilities in FreeXL Library

Talos has discovered two remote code execution vulnerabilities in the the FreeXL library. FreeXL is an open source C library to extract valid data from within an Excel (.xls) spreadsheet. Exploiting these vulnerabilities can potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim’s machine. If an attacker builds a specially crafted XLS (Excel) […]

September 11, 2017 • 1 min read
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Another Apache Struts Vulnerability Under Active Exploitation

This post authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Alex Chiu. Earlier this week, a critical vulnerability in Apache Struts was publically disclosed in a security advisory. This new vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-9805, manifests due to the way the REST plugin uses XStreamHandler with an instance of XStream for deserialization without any type filtering. As […]

September 7, 2017 • 1 min read
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Threat Round Up for Aug 25 – Sep 1

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between August 25 and September 1. As with previous round-ups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we’ve observed by highlighting key behavior characteristics, indicators of compromise, and how our customers are automatically […]

September 1, 2017 • 1 min read
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Back to Basics: Worm Defense in the Ransomware Age

This post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana The Prequel In March 2017, Microsoft released a security update for various versions of Windows, which addressed a remote code execution vulnerability affecting a protocol called SMBv1 (MS17-010). As this vulnerability could allow a […]

August 31, 2017 • 1 min read
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Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Gdk-Pixbuf Vulnerabilities

Today, Talos is disclosing the discovery of two remote code execution vulnerabilities which have been identified in the Gdk-Pixbuf Toolkit. This toolkit used in multiple desktop applications including Chromium, Firefox, GNOME thumbnailer, VLC and others. Exploiting this vulnerability allows an attacker to gain full control over the victim’s machine. If an attacker builds a specially […]

August 30, 2017 • 1 min read
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Vulnerability Spotlight: Code Execution Vulnerability in LabVIEW

LabVIEW is a system design and development platform released by National Instruments. The software is widely used to create applications for data acquisition, instrument control and industrial automation. Talos is disclosing the presence of a code execution vulnerability which can be triggered by opening specially crafted VI files, the proprietary file format used by LabVIEW. […]

August 29, 2017 • 1 min read
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Vulnerability Spotlight: Lexmark Perceptive Document Filters Code Execution Bugs

Overview Talos is disclosing a pair of code execution vulnerabilities in Lexmark Perceptive Document Filters. Perceptive Document Filters are a series of libraries that are used to parse massive amounts of different types of file formats for multiple purposes. Talos has previously discussed in detail these filters and how they operate. The software update to […]

August 28, 2017 • 1 min read