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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

April 30, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Sodinokibi Ransomware Exploits WebLogic Server Vulnerability

This blog was authored by Pierre Cadieux, Colin Grady, Jaeson Schultz and Matt Valites Attackers are actively exploiting a recently disclosed vulnerability in Oracle WebLogic to install a new variant of ransomware called “Sodinokibi.” Sodinokibi attempts to encrypt data in a user’s…

April 26, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for April 19 to April 26

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between Apr. 19 and Apr. 26. 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…

April 25, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple vulnerabilities in Sierra Wireless AirLink ES450

Carl Hurd and Jared Rittle of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Executive summary Several exploitable vulnerabilities exist in the Sierra Wireless AirLink ES450, an LTE gateway designed for distributed enterprise, such as retail point-of-sale or industrial control systems. These flaws pr…

April 25, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

JasperLoader Emerges, Targets Italy with Gootkit Banking Trojan

Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin authored this blog post with contributions from Andrew Williams. Introduction to JasperLoader Malware loaders are playing an increasingly important role in malware distribution. They give adversaries the ability to gain an initial foothold on a system and are typica…

April 23, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

DNSpionage brings out the Karkoff

In November 2018, Cisco Talos discovered an attack campaign, called DNSpionage, in which threat actors created a new remote administrative tool that supports HTTP and DNS communication with the attackers’ command and control(C2). Since then, there have been several other public reports of addi…

April 19, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for April 12 to April 19

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between Apr. 12 and Apr. 19. 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…

April 17, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

DNS Hijacking Abuses Trust In Core Internet Service

This blog post discusses the technical details of a state-sponsored attack manipulating DNS systems. While this incident is limited to targeting primarily national security organizations in the Middle East and North Africa, and we do not want to overstate the consequences of this specific campaign,…

April 15, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

New HawkEye Reborn Variant Emerges Following Ownership Change

Edmund Brumaghin and Holger Unterbrink authored this blog post. Executive summary Malware designed to steal sensitive information has been a threat to organizations around the world for a long time. The emergence of the greyware market and the increased commercialization of keyloggers, stealers, and…

April 15, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple vulnerabilities in Shimo VPN’s helper tool

Cisco Talos is disclosing a series of vulnerabilities found in the Shimo VPN Helper Tool. Shimo VPN is a popular VPN client for MacOS that can be used to connect multiple VPN accounts to one application. These specific vulnerabilities were found in the “helper tool,” a feature that Shimo VPN uses to…