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

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Reverse Social Engineering Tech Support Scammers

1 min read

This post is authored by Jaime Filson and Dave Liebenberg. Background The amount of fraudulent actors masquerading as legitimate tech support has been on the rise since 2008. According to David Finn, executive director at the Microsoft Cybercrime Center, tech support scammers have made nearly $1.5 billion off of 3.3 million unwitting victims just this […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Domains of the Living Dead

1 min read

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “If you’re ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you’re ready for any emergency.” While events haven’t yet risen to the level of “zombie apocalypse”, computer attackers are continuing to use their voodoo to zombify Internet domains, and repurpose them for their own heinous crimes. Read […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Cisco Identifies Multiple Vulnerabilities in Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd)

1 min read

Cisco is committed to improving the overall security of the products and services our customers rely on. As part of this commitment, Cisco assesses the security of software components used in our products. Open source software plays a key role in many Cisco products and as a result, ensuring the security of open source software […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Dangerous Clipboard: Analysis of the MS15-072 Patch

1 min read

This post was authored by Marcin Noga with contributions from Jaeson Schultz. Have you ever thought about how security researchers take a patch that has been released, and then reverse it to find the underlying security issue? Well, back In July Microsoft released security bulletin MS15-072, titled: “Vulnerability in Windows Graphics Component Could Allow Elevation […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – October 2015

4 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 is fairly light with a total of 6 bulletins released addressing 33 vulnerabilities. Half of the bulletins are rated “Critical” and address vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, JScript/VBScript, and the […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Project Aspis

2 min read

One of the hardest jobs on the Internet is to work the abuse desk at a hosting provider. These teams have to strike a difficult balance between protecting their customers, ensuring that their services aren’t being abused by malicious actors and delivering the service and convenience their customers expect. They don’t get near enough credit […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Threat Spotlight: Cisco Talos Thwarts Access to Massive International Exploit Kit Generating $60M Annually From Ransomwa …

3 min read

This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Joel Esler, Nick Hebert, Warren Mercer, Matt Olney, Melissa Taylor, and Craig Williams. Executive Summary Today, Cisco struck a blow to a group of hackers, disrupting a significant international revenue stream generated by the notorious Angler Exploit Kit. Angler is one of the largest exploit kit […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Vulnerability Spotlight: MiniUPnP Internet Gateway Device Protocol XML Parser Buffer Overflow

3 min read

Vulnerability discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos. Post authored by Earl Carter and William Largent Talos is disclosing the discovery of an exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability in the the MiniUPnP library TALOS-2015-0035 (CVE-2015-6031). The buffer overflow is present in client-side XML parser functionality in miniupnpc. A specially crafted XML response can lead to a […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Down the Rabbit Hole: Botnet Analysis for Non-Reverse Engineers

9 min read

This post is authored by Earl Carter & Holger Unterbrink. Overview Talos is often tasked with mapping the backend network for a specific piece of malware. One approach is to first reverse engineer the sample and determine exactly how it operates. But what if there is no time or resources to take the sample apart? […]