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Blog post

Bypassing MiniUPnP Stack Smashing Protection

This post was authored by Aleksandar Nikolic, Warren Mercer, and Jaeson Schultz. Summary MiniUPnP is commonly used to allow two devices which are behind NAT firewalls to communicate with each other by opening connections in each of the firewalls, commonly known as “hole punching”. Various software implementations of this technique enable various peer-to-peer software applications, […]

January 27, 2016 • 1 min read
Blog post

Research Spotlight: Needles in a Haystack

This post was authored by Mariano Graziano. Malware sandboxes are automated dynamic analysis systems that execute programs in a controlled environment. Within the large volumes of samples submitted daily to these services, some submissions appear to be different from others and show interesting characteristics. At USENIX Security 2015 I presented a paper in which we […]

January 14, 2016 • 1 min read
Blog post

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – January 2016

The first 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 is relatively light with nine bulletins addressing 25 vulnerabilities. Six bulletins are rated critical and address vulnerabilities in Edge, Internet Explorer, JScript/VBScript, Office, Silverlight, and Windows. […]

January 12, 2016 • 1 min read
Blog post

Threat Spotlight: Holiday Greetings from Pro PoS – Is your payment card data someone else’s Christmas present?

The post was authored by Ben Baker and Earl Carter. Payment cards without an EMV chip have reached their end-of-life. Point of Sale (PoS) malware, such as PoSeidon, has continued to threaten businesses. The news is continually filled with stories of payment card data being stolen through a breach in the company’s PoS system. From […]

December 17, 2015 • 2 min read
Blog post

Threat Spotlight: Cryptowall 4 – The Evolution Continues

This post is authored by Andrea Allievi and Holger Unterbrink with contributions from Warren Mercer. Executive Summary Over the past year, Talos has devoted a significant amount of time to better understanding how ransomware operates, its relation to other malware, and its economic impact. This research has proven valuable for Talos and led the development […]

December 10, 2015 • 2 min read
Blog post

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – December 2015

Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release sees a total of 12 bulletins released which address 71 vulnerabilities. Eight bulletins are rated “Critical” this month and address vulnerabilities in Graphics Component, Edge, Internet Explorer, Office, Silverlight, Uniscribe, and VBScript. The other […]

December 8, 2015 • 1 min read
Blog post

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – November 2015

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday 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 53 vulnerabilities. Four bulletins are rated critical and address vulnerabilities in Edge, Internet Explorer, Windows Journal, and Windows. The remaining eight bulletins are rated important […]

November 10, 2015 • 1 min read