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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

May 31, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for May 24 to May 31

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between May 17 and May 24. As with previous roundups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we’ve observed by highlighting key behavioral ch…

May 30, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

10 years of virtual dynamite: A high-level retrospective of ATM malware

It has been 10 years since the discovery of Skimer, first malware specifically designed to attack automated teller machines (ATMs). At the time, the learning curve for understanding its functionality was rather steep and analysis required specific knowledge of a manufacturer’s ATM API function…

May 24, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for May 17 to May 24

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between May 17 and May 24. As with previous roundups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we’ve observed by highlighting key behavioral ch…

May 23, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

One year later: The VPNFilter catastrophe that wasn’t

One year ago, Cisco Talos first disclosed the existence of VPNFilter on May 23, 2018. The malware made headlines across the globe, as it was a sophisticated piece of malware developed by a nation state, infecting half a million devices, and poised to cause havoc. Yet the attack was averted. This is…

May 23, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Sorpresa! JasperLoader targets Italy with a new bag of tricks

Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin authored this blog post. Executive summary Over the past few months, a new malware loader has emerged that targets Italy and other European countries with banking trojans such as Gootkit. We recently released a comprehensive analysis of the functionality associated…

May 20, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Recent MuddyWater-associated BlackWater campaign shows signs of new anti-detection techniques

This blog was authored by Danny Adamitis, David Maynor, and Kendall McKay Executive summary Cisco Talos assesses with moderate confidence that a campaign we recently discovered called “BlackWater” is associated with suspected persistent threat actor MuddyWater. Newly associated samples…

May 6, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple bugs in several Jenkins plugins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server written in Java. There are several plugins that exist to integrate Jenkins with other pieces of software, such as GitLab. Today, Cisco Talos is disclosing vulnerabilities in three of these plugins: Swarm, Ansible and GitLab. All three of these are informat…

May 3, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for April 26 to May 3

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between April 26 and May 03. As with previous roundups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we’ve observed by highlighting key behavioral…

May 2, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Qakbot levels up with new obfuscation techniques

Qakbot, also known as Qbot, is a well-documented banking trojan that has been around since 2008. Recent Qakbot campaigns, however, are utilizing an updated persistence mechanism that can make it harder for users to detect and remove the trojan. Qakbot is known to target businesses with the hope of s…