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

CVE-2015-0235: A GHOST in the Machine

2 min read

This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Earl Carter, Alex Chiu and Jaeson Schultz On Tuesday January 27, 2015, security researchers from Qualys published information concerning a 0-day vulnerability in the GNU C library. The vulnerability, known as “GHOST” (a.k.a. CVE-2015-0235), is a buffer overflow in the __nss_hostname_digits_dots() function. As a proof-of-concept, Qualys has detailed a remote exploit for […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Flash 0-day Exploited by Angler Exploit Kit

3 min read

This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Earl Carter and Jaeson Schultz Flash has long been a favorite target among Exploit Kits (EK). In October 2014 the Angler EK was believed to be targeting a new Flash vulnerability. The bug that the Angler exploit kit was attempting to exploit had been “accidentally” patched by Adobe’s […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Microsoft Update Tuesday January 2015: Another Light Month, No IE Bulletins, More Changes to Reporting

3 min read

This post was written by Yves Younan. Microsoft’s first Update Tuesday of 2015 is pretty light, there’s a total of eight bulletins, all covering a single vulnerability. Seven of these bulletins are rated as important and just one is rated critical. No bulletin for IE is being released this month. Two of the vulnerabilities were […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Ransomware on Steroids: Cryptowall 2.0

6 min read

This post was authored by Andrea Allievi and Earl Carter. Ransomware holds a user’s data hostage. The latest ransomware variants encrypt the user’s data, thus making it unusable until a ransom is paid to retrieve the decryption key. The latest Cryptowall 2.0, utilizes TOR to obfuscate the command and control channel. The dropper utilizes multiple […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Wiper Malware – A Detection Deep Dive

5 min read

This post was authored by Christopher Marczewski with contributions from Craig WIlliams *This blog post has been updated to include Command and Control IP addresses used by the malware. A new piece of wiper malware has received quite a bit of media attention. Despite all the recent press, Cisco’s Talos team has historic examples of […]

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Talos Group

Ancient Mac Site Harbors Botnet that Exploits IE Vulnerability

6 min read

This post was authored by Alex Chiu and Shaun Hurley. Last month, Microsoft released a security bulletin to patch CVE-2014-6332, a vulnerability within Windows Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) that could result in remote code execution if a user views a maliciously crafted web page with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Since then, there have been several […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Dridex Is Back, then it’s gone again

2 min read

This post was authored by Armin Pelkmann and Earl Carter. Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group noticed a reappearance of several Dridex email campaigns, starting last week and continuing into this week as well. Dridex is in a nutshell, malware designed to steal your financial account information. The attack attempts to get the user to install the […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for December 2014: Light Month, Some Changes

3 min read

This post was authored by Yves Younan. Today, Microsoft is releasing their final Update Tuesday of 2014. Last year, the end of year update was relatively large. This time, it’s relatively light with a total of seven bulletins, covering 24 CVEs. Three of those bulletins are rated critical and four are considered to be important. […]

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Group

MS14-063 A Potential XP Exploit

5 min read

This post was written by Marcin Noga with contributions by Earl Carter and Martin Lee. New vulnerabilities for old operating systems may not seem particularly interesting, until you consider the large number of legacy machines running outdated versions of Windows. Windows XP has reached its end of life, meaning that new vulnerabilities will not be […]