Articles

Blog post

In the Eye of the Hailstorm

This blog post was authored by Jakob Dohrmann, David Rodriguez, and Jaeson Schultz. The Cisco Talos and Umbrella research teams are deploying a distributed hailstorm detection system which brings together machine learning, stream processing of DNS requests and the curated Talos email corpus. Talos has discussed snowshoe spam before. Traditional snowshoe spam campaigns are sent […]

December 19, 2016 • 1 min read
Blog post

Vulnerability Spotlight: Joyent SmartOS

Vulnerability discovered by Tyler Bohan Overview Talos is disclosing a series of vulnerabilities in Joyent SmartOS, specifically in the Hyprlofs filesystem. SmartOS is an open source hypervisor that is based on a branch of Opensolaris. Hyperlofs is a SmartOS in-memory filesystem that allows users to map files from various different locations under a single namespace. […]

December 13, 2016 • 1 min read
Blog post

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – December 2016

The final patch Tuesday of 2016 has arrived. Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release contains 12 bulletins addressing 48 vulnerabilities. Six bulletins are rated critical and address vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Edge, Microsoft Graphics Components, Microsoft Uniscribe, and Adobe Flash […]

December 13, 2016 • 1 min read
Blog post

Cerber Spam: Tor All the Things!

This post authored by Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin with contributions from Sean Baird and Andrew Windsor. Executive Summary Talos is continuously analyzing email based malware always looking at how adversaries change and the new techniques that are being added on an almost constant basis. Recently we noticed some novel ways that adversaries are leveraging […]

November 28, 2016 • 1 min read
Blog post

Fareit Spam: Rocking Out to a New File Type

This post authored by Nick Biasini Talos is constantly monitoring the threat landscape including the email threat landscape. Lately this landscape has been dominated with Locky distribution. During a recent Locky vacation Talos noticed an interesting shift in file types being used to distribute another well known malware family, Fareit. We’ve discussed Fareit before, it’s […]

November 22, 2016 • 1 min read
Blog post

Crashing Stacks Without Squishing Bugs: Advanced Vulnerability Analysis

Overview Crash triaging can be a long and complicated process; by using proper tools and having an optimal approach, we can make this a bit easier and less time consuming. In this post we describe a triaging strategy and toolset based on two examples of vulnerability classes: Stack based buffer overflow Heap based buffer overflow […]

November 15, 2016 • 1 min read