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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

October 13, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

LockyDump – All Your Configs Are Belong To Us

1 min read

      Locky has continued to evolve since its inception in February 2016. This has made it difficult to track at times due to changes in the way in which it’s distributed as well as various characteristics of the malware itself. The actors responsible for Locky have continuously attempted to improve operational security (OpSec) […]

October 11, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – October 2016

1 min read

Patch Tuesday has once again arrived! Microsoft’s monthly release of security bulletins to address vulnerabilities provides fixes for 37 newly disclosed security flaws. Today’s release sees a total of 10 bulletins with five of the bulletins rated critical, addressing vulnerabilities in Edge, Graphics Component, Internet Explorer, Video Control, and Adobe Flash Player. Four bulletins are […]

October 3, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: FreeImage Library XMP Image Handling Code Execution Vulnerability

1 min read

Exploit uses a maliciously crafted image file as an email attachment or via an instant message.

September 30, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: OpenJPEG JPEG2000 mcc record Code Execution Vulnerability

1 min read

Vulnerability discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos Overview Talos has identified an exploitable out-of-bounds vulnerability in the JPEG 2000 image file format parser implemented in OpenJPEG library (TALOS-2016-0193/CVE-2016-8332). The JPEG 2000 file format is commonly used for embedding images inside PDF documents. This particular vulnerability could allow an out-of-bound heap write to occur, resulting […]

September 29, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Want Tofsee My Pictures? A Botnet Gets Aggressive

1 min read

This post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin Summary Tofsee is multi-purpose malware that has been in existence for several years, operating since at least 2013. It features a number of modules that are used to carry out various activities such as sending spam messages, conducting click fraud, mining cryptocurrency, and more. Once infected, systems become […]

September 27, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: GozNym

1 min read

This blog was authored by Ben Baker, Edmund Brumaghin, and Jonah Samost. Executive Summary GozNym is the combination of features from two previously identified families of malware, Gozi and Nymaim. Gozi was a widely distributed banking trojan with a known Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) and also contained the ability to install a Master Boot Record […]

September 21, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

The Rising Tides of Spam

1 min read

This blog post was authored by Jaeson Schultz. For the past five years we have enjoyed a relatively calm period with respect to spam volumes. Back at the turn of the decade the world was experiencing record-high volumes of spam. However, with the evolution of new anti-spam technologies, combined with some high-profile takedowns of spam-related […]

September 13, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – September 2016

1 min read

This post was authored by Jaeson Schultz. Well it’s Microsoft Patch Tuesday, again, and that must mean we are girding our systems against another round of security vulnerabilities. This month Microsoft has released fourteen (14) bulletins covering fifty (50) security vulnerabilities. There are seven bulletins in the set whose severity is considered “Critical”. These “Critical” […]

September 1, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos ShadowGate Take Down: Global Malvertising Campaign Thwarted

1 min read

Yet another example of how organizations work together to stop threats affecting users around the globe.