Snort

3 min read

            Intro Historically, networks have always been at risk for new, undiscovered threats. The risk of state sponsored hackers or criminal organizations utilizing 0-day was a constant, and the best defense was simply to keep adding on technologies to maximize the odds of detecting the new threat – like adding […]

1 min read

Cisco Talos is aware of the public discourse surrounding the malware family dubbed “The Equation Family”. As of February 17th the following rules (33543 – 33546 MALWARE-CNC Win.Trojan.Equation) were released to detect the Equation Family traffic. These rules may be found in the Cisco FireSIGHT Management Console (Defense Center), or in the Subscriber Ruleset on […]

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On October 7, 2013 Cisco completed the acquisition of Sourcefire. At that time, I recognized this via Twitter and checked out the products on their website. I was excited to...

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A little more than a year ago when Sourcefire became a part of Cisco, we reaffirmed our commitment to open source innovation and pledged to continue support for Snort and other open source projects. Our announcement of the OpenAppID initiative earlier this year was one of several ways we have delivered on this promise. Today we are […]

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This post was authored by Alex Chiu with contributions from Joel Esler. Advanced persistent threats are a problem that many companies and organizations of all sizes face.  In the past two days, information regarding a highly targeted campaign known as ‘Regin’ has been publicly disclosed.  The threat actors behind ‘Regin’ appear to be targeting organizations […]

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As of May 1, 2014, we can confirm Cisco customers have been targets of this attack. For the latest coverage information and additional details see our new post on the VRT blog. Protecting company critical assets is a continuing challenge under normal threat conditions. The disclosure of zero-day exploits only makes the job of IT […]

4 min read

#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists, hosted by Cisco’s Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja). This week Chris Young, SVP Security Business Group Cisco, and Bill Carter, Senior Network Engineer and Cisco Champion, talk about Intelligent Cyber Security for the real world. Listen to the Podcast Cisco Subject Matter Expert: Chris Young, SVP […]

7 min read

Anyone can purchase an exploit pack (EP) license or rent time on an existing EP server. The challenge for threat actors is to redirect unsuspecting web browsing victims by force to the exploit landing page with sustained frequency. Naturally, like most criminal services in the underground, the dark art of traffic generation is a niche specialty that must be purchased to ensure drive-by campaign success. For the past year we have been tracking a threat actor (group) that compromises legitimate websites and redirects victims to EP landing pages. Over the past three months we observed the same actor using malvertising - leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs) to facilitate increased victim redirection - as part of larger exploit pack campaigns.

2 min read

One of the big lessons I learned during the early days, when I was first creating Snort®, was that the open source model was an incredibly strong way to build great software and attack difficult problems in a way that the user community rallied around. I still see this as one of the chief strengths […]