Omar Santos
Principal Engineer
Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) Security Research and Operations
Articles
Using DNS RPZ to Block Malicious DNS Requests
After delivering several presentations at Cisco Live and Cisco Connect this year, I received a few questions regarding DNS Response Policy Zones (RPZ) and how can they be used to block DNS resolution to known malicious hosts and sites. I decided to write this short post to explain what it is and pro…
BREACH, CRIME and Black Hat
During the last three years, the security research community has been having a lot of fun with SSL/TLS uncovering a few nifty attacks. First, in 2011, Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong released the details about the BEAST attack on Transport Layer Security (TLS) at the ekoparty Security Conference in Bue…
BYOD: Many Call It Bring Your Own Malware (BYOM)
It is not new that people are referring to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as Bring Your Own Malware (BYOM). In 2012 alone, Android malware encounters grew 2,577 percent (for details, see Cisco’s Annual Security Report). Many organizations are struggling to keep up with the BYOD trend by allowing…
Security Automation Live Webcast!
UPDATE: Webcast information is also now available at the Cisco Live 365 site Many network security administrators are struggling to keep their network “up-to-date” with the constant release of new vulnerabilities and software fixes. At the same time, they’re under pressure to provi…
I Can’t Keep Up with All These Cisco Security Advisories: Do I Have to Upgrade?
“A security advisory was just published! Should I hurry and upgrade all my Cisco devices now?” This is a question that I am being asked by customers on a regular basis. In fact, I am also asked why there are so many security vulnerability advisories. To start with the second question: Ci…
March Madness May Equal to Malware Madness
Are you excited about March Madness? Turn on a TV and it will be hard to avoid the games, the news, the commentaries, and the jokes about it. If you eavesdrop in any restaurant, bar, or office conversation, I can assure you that you will hear something about it. Even U.S. President Barack Obama fill…
Happy New Exploit Kits! (I mean Happy Belated New Year!)
It’s only been a few days since we said goodbye to 2012 and we are already seeing what many predicted for 2013: an increase in the creation, enhancement, and usage of numerous exploit kits by cyber criminals. Cyber criminals don’t take long vacations in December. On the contrary, they &#…
Red October in January: The Cyber Espionage Era
Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have released information about a large-scale cyber espionage campaign called Operation Red October (otherwise known as Rocra). The report has garnered the attention of multiple news agencies and generated many published articles since the Kaspersky report has claimed…
New Java Vulnerability Being Exploited in the Wild
The new Oracle Java arbitrary code execution vulnerability has not only hit many news wires and social media outlets, but many victims as well, and it has been incorporated into several exploit kits. This critical vulnerability, as documented in IntelliShield alert 27845, could allow an unauthentic…
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