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Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

The Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group (Talos) is made up of leading threat researchers supported by sophisticated systems to create threat intelligence for Cisco products that detects, analyzes and protects against both known and emerging threats. Talos maintains the official rule sets of Snort.org, ClamAV, SenderBase.org and SpamCop. This blog profile is managed by multiple authors with expertise that spans software development, reverse engineering, vulnerability triage, malware investigation and intelligence gathering.

Talos is the primary team that contributes threat information to the Cisco Collective Security Intelligence (CSI) ecosystem. Cisco CSI is shared across multiple security solutions and provides industry-leading security protections and efficacy. In addition to threat researchers, CSI is driven by intelligence infrastructure, product and service telemetry, public and private feeds and the open source community.

Articles

March 10, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for the Week of Mar 6 – Mar 10

1 min read

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed over the past week. As with our previous threat round-up, 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 […]

March 9, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: R – PDF LoadEncoding Code Execution Vulnerability

1 min read

Vulnerability Discovered by Cory Duplantis of Cisco Talos Overview Talos is disclosing TALOS-2016-0227 / CVE-2016-8714 which is a buffer overflow vulnerability in the LoadEncoding functionality of the R programming language version 3.3.0. The R programming language is commonly used in statistical computing and is supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. R is praised […]

March 8, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Content-Type: Malicious – New Apache Struts2 0-day Under Attack

1 min read

This Post Authored by Nick Biasini UPDATE: It was recently disclosed that in addition to Content-Type being vulnerable, both Content-Disposition and Content-Length can be manipulated to trigger this particular vulnerability. No new CVE was listed, however details of the vulnerability and remediation are available in this security advisory. Talos has observed a new Apache vulnerability […]

March 8, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Crypt0l0cker (TorrentLocker): Old Dog, New Tricks

1 min read

Ransomware continues to be a plague on the internet and still sets itself as the fastest growing malware family we have seen in the last number of years. In this post we describe the technical details about a newly observed campaign of the notorious Crypt0l0cker (aka TorrentLocker or Teerac) ransomware. Crypt0l0cker has gone through a […]

March 3, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Malware Round-up For The Week of Feb 27 – Mar 3

1 min read

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed over the past week. Unlike our other posts, 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 protected from […]

March 2, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Covert Channels and Poor Decisions: The Tale of DNSMessenger

1 min read

This post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin and Colin Grady Executive Summary The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most commonly used Internet application protocols on corporate networks. It is responsible for providing name resolution so that network resources can be accessed by name, rather than requiring users to memorize IP addresses. While […]

February 27, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Cisco Coverage for Smart Install Client Protocol Abuse

1 min read

Summary Talos has become aware of active scanning against customer infrastructure with the intent of finding Cisco Smart Install clients. Cisco Smart Install is one component of the Cisco Smart Operations solution that facilitates the management of LAN switches. Research has indicated that malicious actors may be leveraging detailed knowledge of the Smart Install Protocol to […]

February 27, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple remote code execution vulnerabilities in Iceni Argus PDF Content Extraction affect Mar …

1 min read

Overview Talos has discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Iceni Argus PDF content extraction product. Exploiting these vulnerabilities can allow an attacker to gain full control over the victim’s machine. Although the main product is deprecated by Iceni, the library is still supported. Iceni has released a patched version that addresses these vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, the library is […]

February 23, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Korean MalDoc Drops Evil New Years Presents

1 min read

Talos investigated a targeted malware campaign against South Korean users, based on a Hangul Word Processor document (HWP), a popular alternative to Microsoft Office for South Korean users developed by Hancom.