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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 27, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Bypassing MiniUPnP Stack Smashing Protection

1 min read

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 14, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Research Spotlight: Needles in a Haystack

1 min read

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 12, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – January 2016

1 min read

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 7, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Rigging compromise – RIG Exploit Kit

1 min read

This Post was Authored by Nick Biasini, with contributions by Joel Esler Exploit Kits are one of the biggest threats that affects users, both inside and outside the enterprise, as it indiscriminately compromises simply by visiting a web site, delivering a malicious payload. One of the challenges with exploit kits is at any given time […]

December 17, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

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

2 min read

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 10, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Cryptowall 4 – The Evolution Continues

2 min read

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 8, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – December 2015

1 min read

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 […]

November 23, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Holiday Shopping Threat Avoidance

1 min read

The holidays are upon us and the shopping season is kicking into high gear. This year, an estimated 270 million consumers will shop online and, for the first time, more than half of them will use mobile devices to check off their holiday shopping lists. With consumers searching for holiday discounts through display ads, social […]

November 10, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – November 2015

1 min read

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 […]