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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

November 8, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – November 2016

1 min read

Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. For a detailed explanation of each of the categories listed below, please go to https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/gg309177.aspx. This month’s release is packed full of goodies, but you don’t want to wait to review them over Thanksgiving dinner as there […]

November 3, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Take the RIG Pill: Down the Rabbit Hole

1 min read

Executive Summary Talos is monitoring the big notorious Exploit Kits(EK) on an ongoing basis. Since Angler disappeared a few month ago, RIG is one EK which seems to be trying to fill the gap Angler has left. We see an ongoing development on RIG. This report gives more details about the complex infection process the […]

November 2, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Windows 10 Remote Denial of Service

1 min read

Talos is releasing an advisory for a remote denial of service attack vulnerability in Microsoft Windows 10 AHCACHE.SYS. An attacker can craft a malicious portable executable file, which if accessed causes AHCACHE.SYS to attempt to access out of scope memory. This triggers a bugcheck in the Windows kernel causing the system to crash, denying service […]

October 31, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Sundown EK: You Better Take Care

1 min read

This post was authored by Nick Biasini Over the last six months the exploit kit landscape has seen some major changes. These changes began with Nuclear ceasing operations in April/May and arrests in Russia coinciding with the end of Angler in June. Recently, Neutrino has been added to the list of exploit kits that have […]

October 25, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: LibTIFF Issues Lead To Code Execution

1 min read

These Vulnerabilities were discovered by Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos. Talos is releasing multiple vulnerabilities (TALOS-2016-0187, TALOS-2016-0190 & TALOS-2016-0205) in the LibTIFF library . One vulnerability (TALOS-2016-0187) is an exploitable heap based buffer overflow that impacts the LibTIFF TIFF2PDF conversion tool. Another vulnerability (TALOS-2016-0190) impacts the parsing and handling of TIFF images ultimately leading to […]

October 24, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Pumpkin Spiced Locky

1 min read

This post was authored by Warren Mercer & Edmund Brumaghin Summary We had .locky, we had .odin and then we had .zepto but today we hit rock bottom and we now have Locky using .shit as their encrypted file extension. In today’s latest wave of spam, Talos has observed three distinct spam campaigns distributing the […]

October 19, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

MBRFilter – Can’t Touch This!

1 min read

This post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin and Yves Younan Summary Ransomware has become increasingly prevalent in the industry, and in many cases, unless there is a publicly released decryptor available, there is often not an easy means of retrieving encrypted files once a system has been infected. In addition to the creation and maintenance […]

October 18, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Hopper Disassembler ELF Section Header Size Code Execution

1 min read

Vulnerability Discovered by Tyler Bohan and Cory Duplantis of Cisco Talos Talos has identified an exploitable out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the ELF Section Header parsing functionality of Hopper (TALOS-2016-0222/CVE-2016-8390). Hopper is a reverse engineering tool for macOS and Linux allowing the user to disassemble and decompile 32/64bit Intel-based Mac, Linux, Windows and iOS executables. During the parsing […]

October 18, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Foxit PDF Reader JBIG2 Parser Information Disclosure

1 min read

Vulnerability discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Talos. Talos has identified an information disclosure vulnerability in Foxit PDF Reader (TALOS-2016-0201/CVE-2016-8334). A wrongly bounded call to `memcpy`, while parsing jbig2 segments within a PDF file, can be triggered in Foxit PDF Reader causing an out-of-bounds heap memory to be read into a buffer. The `memcpy` call is properly […]