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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

February 18, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

JavaScript bridge makes malware analysis with WinDbg easier

As malware researchers, we spend several days a week debugging malware in order to learn more about it. For that, we have several powerful and popular user mode tools to choose from, such as OllyDbg, x64dbg, IDA Pro and Immunity Debugger. All these debuggers utilize some scripting language to automa…

February 15, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for Feb. 8 to Feb. 15

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 12, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday — February 2019: Vulnerability disclosures and Snort coverage

Microsoft released its monthly security update today, disclosing a variety of vulnerabilities in several of its products. The latest Patch Tuesday covers 69 vulnerabilities, 20 of which are rated “critical,” 46 that are considered “important” and three that are “moderate.” This release also includes…

February 11, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

What you can learn from Cisco Talos’ new oil pumpjack workshop

Paul Rascagneres wrote this blog post with contributions from Patrick DeSantis from Cisco Talos ARES (Advanced Research/Embedded Systems). Executive summary Every day, more industrial control systems (ICS) become vulnerable to cyber attacks. As these massive, critical machines become more interconne…

February 8, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for Feb. 1 to Feb. 8

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between Feb. 1 and Feb. 8. 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…

February 6, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

2018 in Snort Signatures

The cybersecurity field shifted quite a bit in 2018. With the boom of cryptocurrency, we saw a transition from ransomware to cryptocurrency miners. Talos researchers identified APT campaigns including VPNFilter, predominantly affecting small business and home office networking equipment, as well as…

February 4, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

ExileRAT shares C2 with LuckyCat, targets Tibet

Cisco Talos recently observed a malware campaign delivering malicious Microsoft PowerPoint document using a mailing list run by the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), an organization officially representing the Tibetan government-in-exile. The document used in the attack was a PPSX file, a file f…

February 1, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Roundup for Jan. 25 to Feb. 1

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between Jan. 25 and Feb. 1. 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…

January 30, 2019

THREAT RESEARCH

Cisco Job Posting Targets Korean Candidates

Edmund Brumaghin and Paul Rascagneres authored this post, with contributions from Jungsoo An. Executive summary Cisco Talos recently observed a targeted malware campaign being leveraged in an attempt to compromise specific organizations. The infection vector associated with this campaign was a Micro…