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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

March 18, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

IPv6 unmasking via UPnP

Martin Zeiser and Aleksandar Nikolich authored this post EXECUTIVE SUMMARY With tools such as ZMap and Masscan and general higher bandwidth availability, exhaustive internet-wide scans of full IPv4 address space have become the norm after it was once impractical. Projects like Shodanand Scans.io agg…

March 15, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for March 8 to March 15

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between Mar. 8 and Mar. 15. 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 c…

March 13, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

GlitchPOS: New PoS malware for sale

Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres authored this post with contributions from Ben Baker. Executive summary Point-of-sale malware is popular among attackers, as it usually leads to them obtaining credit card numbers and immediately use that information for financial gain. This type of malware is gene…

March 8, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for Mar. 1 to Mar. 8

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between March 01 and March 08. 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 behaviora…

March 5, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Cisco, Talos tout importance of IoT security at RSA keynote

By 2020, Gartner predicts 20 billion connected devices will be online — and more devices mean more security threats. Connected devices have exploded into the public and corporate landscape, rattling the bars of the cyber security cage. In a keynote address at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Mat…

March 1, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for Feb. 22 to March 1

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between Feb. 8 and Feb. 15. 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 c…

February 26, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Cisco Talos Honeypot Analysis Reveals Rise in Attacks on Elasticsearch Clusters

Cisco Talos warns users that they need to keep a close eye on unsecured Elasticsearch clusters. We have recently observed a spike in attacks from multiple threat actors targeting these clusters. These attackers are targeting clusters using versions 1.4.2 and lower, and are leveraging old vulnerabili…

February 22, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for Feb. 15 to Feb. 22

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between Feb. 8 and Feb. 15. 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 c…

February 20, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Combing Through Brushaloader Amid Massive Detection Uptick

Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin authored this blog post with contributions from Matthew Molyett.  Executive Summary Over the past several months, Cisco Talos has been monitoring various malware distribution campaigns leveraging the malware loader Brushaloader to deliver malware payloads to systems…