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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 26, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Who Wasn’t Responsible for Olympic Destroyer?

This blog post is authored by Paul Rascagneres and Martin Lee. Summary Absent contributions from traditional intelligence capacities, the available evidence linking the Olympic Destroyer malware to a specific threat actor group is contradictory, and does not allow for unambiguous attribution. The th…

February 23, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Adobe Acrobat Reader DC Document ID Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Today, Talos is releasing details of a new vulnerability within Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. Adobe Acrobat Reader is the most popular and most feature-rich PDF reader. It has a big user base, is usually a default PDF reader on systems and integrates into web browsers as a plugin for rendering PDFs. As s…

February 14, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

COINHOARDER: Tracking a Ukrainian Bitcoin Phishing Ring DNS Style

This post is authored by Jeremiah O’Connor and Dave Maynor with contributions from Artsiom Holub and Austin McBride.  Executive Summary Cisco has been tracking a bitcoin theft campaign for over 6 months. The campaign was discovered internally and researched with the aid of an intelligence shar…

February 13, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – February 2018

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – February 2018 Today Microsoft has released its monthly set of security advisories for vulnerabilities that have been identified and addressed in various products. This month’s advisory release addresses 54 new vulnerabilities with 14 of them rated critical, 38 o…

February 12, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Olympic Destroyer Takes Aim At Winter Olympics

The Winter Olympics this year is being held in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The Guardian, a UK Newspaper reported an article that suggested the Olympic computer systems suffered technical issues during the opening ceremony. Officials at the games confirmed some technical issues to non-critical systems…

February 6, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Targeted Attacks In The Middle East

This blog post is authored by Paul Rascagneres with assistance of Martin Lee. Executive Summary Talos has identified a targeted attack affecting the Middle East. This campaign contains the following elements, which are described in detail in this article. The use of allegedly confidential decoy doc…

February 2, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Flash 0-Day In The Wild: Group 123 At The Controls

The 1st of February, Adobe published an advisory concerning a Flash vulnerability (CVE-2018-4878). This vulnerability is a use after free that allows Remote Code Execute through a malformed Flash object. Additionally KISA (Korean CERT) published an advisory about a Flash 0-day used in the wild. Talo…

January 31, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Ransom Where? Malicious Cryptocurrency Miners Takeover, Generating Millions

The Dark Side of the Digital Gold Rush This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Edmund Brumaghin, Warren Mercer and Josh Reynolds with contributions from Azim Khodijbaev and David Liebenberg. Executive Summary The threat landscape is constantly changing; over the last few years malware threat vector…

January 29, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

2017 in Snort Signatures.

2017 was an eventful year for cyber security with high profile vulnerabilities that allowed self-replicating worm attacks such as WannaCry and BadRabbit to impact organizations throughout the world. In 2017, Talos researchers discovered many new attacks including backdoors in legitimate software suc…