Threat Research

April 9, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: SSHPsychos

4 min read

This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Matt Olney, & Craig Williams   Introduction Talos has been monitoring a persistent threat for quite some time, a group we refer to as SSHPsychos or Group 93. This group is well known for creating significant amounts of scanning traffic across the Internet. Although our research efforts help […]

April 6, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Spam Served With a Side of Dridex

5 min read

This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Kevin Brooks Overview The use of macro enabled word documents has exploded over the last year, a primary example payload being Dridex. Last week, Talos researchers identified another short lived spam campaign that was delivering a new variant of Dridex. This particular campaign lasted less than […]

April 2, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Research Spotlight: FreeSentry Mitigating use-after-free Vulnerabilities

13 min read

This post was authored by Earl Carter & Yves Younan. Talos is constantly researching the ways in which threat actors take advantage of security weaknesses to exploit systems. Use-after-free vulnerabilities have become an important class of security problems due to the existence of mitigations that protect against other types of vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflows. […]

March 30, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Dyre/Dyreza: An Analysis to Discover the DGA

12 min read

This post was authored by Alex Chiu & Angel Villegas. Overview Banking and sensitive financial information is a highly coveted target for attackers because of the high value and obvious financial implications.  In the past year, a large amount of attention has been centered on Point of Sale (PoS) malware due to its major role in […]

March 17, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Research Spotlight: Exploiting Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities

2 min read

This blog post was authored by Earl Carter & Yves Younan. Talos is constantly researching the ways in which threat actors take advantage of security weaknesses to exploit systems. Yves Younan of Talos will be presenting at CanSecWest on Friday March 20th. The topic of his talk will be FreeSentry, a software-based mitigation technique developed […]

March 12, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Discovery Spotlight: Hundreds of Thousands of Google Apps Domains’ Private WHOIS Information Disclosed

5 min read

This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Alex Chiu, Jaeson Schultz, and Craig Williams. Special thanks to William McVey for his contributions to this post. Table of Contents Overview WHOIS Privacy Protection Why Does This Exist The Issue Implications for the Good/Bad Guys Current State and Mitigations Disclosure Timeline Conclusion Footnotes Overview In mid-2013, a problem […]

March 3, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Angler Lurking in the Domain Shadows

10 min read

This post was authored by Nick Biasini and edited by Joel Esler Overview Over the last several months Talos researchers have been monitoring a massive exploit kit campaign that is utilizing hijacked registrant accounts to create large amounts of subdomains for both initial redirection and exploitation. This campaign has been largely attributed to Angler Exploit […]

March 2, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos is Hiring

1 min read

If you’re an experienced malware reverse engineer, exploit developer, response specialist, intel analyst, or looking to start your career in security, Talos might be the place for you.  We have a number of positions open in Columbia, Maryland; Austin, Texas; San Jose, California; and San Francisco, California.  If you are open to relocation to one […]

February 25, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Malicious PNGs: What You See Is Not All You Get!

3 min read

This post was authored by Earl Carter and Nick Randolph. Threat actors are continually evolving their techniques. One of the latest Graftor variants is delivering a Malware DLL via a PNG file delivery mechanism. Graftor basically indicates some type of trojan hiding in a piece of software. Hiding executables and DLLs in PNG files is […]