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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

January 23, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight – LibBPG Image Decoding Code Execution

1 min read

Overview Talos is disclosing TALOS-2016-0259 / CVE-2016-8710. An exploitable heap write out of bounds vulnerability exists in the decoding of BPG images in libbpg library. A crafted BPG image decoded by libbpg can cause an integer underflow vulnerability causing an out of bounds heap write leading to remote code execution. This vulnerability can be triggered […]

January 20, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Adobe Acrobat Reader DC jpeg Decoder Vulnerability

1 min read

Discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos Overview Talos is disclosing TALOS-2016-0259 / CVE-2017-2791 an uninitialized memory vulnerability in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. Adobe Acrobat Reader is one of the largest and well known PDF readers available today. This particular vulnerability is associated with the JPEG Decoder functionality embedded in the application. A specially crafted […]

January 18, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Without Necurs, Locky Struggles

1 min read

This post authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Jaeson Schultz Locky has been a devastating force for the last year in the spam and ransomware landscape. The Locky variant of ransomware has been responsible for huge amounts of spam messages being sent on a daily basis. The main driver behind this traffic is the […]

January 18, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Code Execution Vulnerabilities in Oracle Outside In Technology

1 min read

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos. Summary Oracle’s Outside In Technology (OIT) is a set of SDKs that software developers can use to perform various actions against a large number of different file formats. According to the OIT website: “Outside In Technology is a suite of software development kits (SDKs) that […]

January 12, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Exploiting the Aerospike Database Server

1 min read

Vulnerabilities discovered by Talos Talos is disclosing multiple vulnerabilities discovered in the Aerospike Database Server. These vulnerabilities range from memory disclosure to potential remote code execution. This software is used by various companies that require a high performance NoSQL database. Aerospike fixed these issues in  version 3.11. The Aerospike Database Server is both a distributed and […]

January 10, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – January 2017

1 min read

Happy New Year to our readers! Today marks the first Patch Tuesday of 2017 with Microsoft releasing their monthly set of bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities. This month’s release is relatively light with 4 bulletins addressing 3 vulnerabilities. Two bulletins are rated critical and address vulnerabilities in Office and Adobe Flash Player while the […]

January 6, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Cisco Coverage for ‘GRIZZLY STEPPE’

1 min read

Over the past several weeks, there have been ongoing discussions regarding cyber attacks that have occurred against several political, governmental, and private sector entities in the United States. These discussions have revolved around allegations that these cyber attacks were designed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. Federal Elections as well as identifying who is responsible […]

December 20, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

IEC 104 Protocol Detection Rules

1 min read

IEC 60870-5-104 Protocol Detection Rules Cisco Talos has released 33 Snort rules which are used to analyze/inspect IEC 60870-5-104 network traffic. These rules will help Industrial Control Systems/Supervisory Control and...

December 20, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Tarantool Denial of Service Vulnerabilities

1 min read

Vulnerabilities discovered by Talos Talos is disclosing two denial of service vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-9036 & CVE-2016-9037) in Tarantool. Tarantool is an open-source lua-based application server. While primarily functioning as an application server, it is also capable of providing database-like features and providing an in-memory database which can be queried using a protocol based around the MsgPack […]