Avatar

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

January 26, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Walt Disney Per-Face Texture Mapping faceInfoSize Code Execution Vulnerability

This vulnerability was discovered by Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos. Executive Summary Walt Disney PTEX is an open source software application maintained by Walt Disney Animation Studios. It is designed for use in post-production rendering. It allows for the storage of thousands of texture mappings with…

January 22, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

SamSam – The Evolution Continues Netting Over $325,000 in 4 Weeks

Talos have been working in conjunction with Cisco IR Services on what we believe to be a new variant of the SamSam ransomware. This ransomware has been observed across multiple industries including Government, Healthcare and ICS. These attacks do not appear to be highly targeted, and appear to be mo…

January 18, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

The Many Tentacles of the Necurs Botnet

This post was written by Jaeson Schultz. Introduction Over the past five years the Necurs botnet has established itself as the largest purveyor of spam worldwide. Necurs is responsible for emailing massive amounts of banking malware, ransomware, dating spam, pump-n-dump stock scams, work from home…

January 17, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Tinysvcmdns Multi-label DNS DoS Vulnerabilility

Overview Talos is disclosing a single NULL pointer dereference vulnerability in the tinysvcmdns library. Tinysvcmdns is a tiny MDNS responder implementation for publishing services. This is essentially a mini and embedded version of Avahi or Bonjour. Read More >>…

January 15, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Korea In The Crosshairs

This blog post is authored by Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres and with contributions from Jungsoo An. This article exposes the malicious activities of Group 123 during 2017. We assess with high confidence that Group 123 was responsible for the following six campaigns: “Golden Time” c…

January 11, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Unpatched Vulnerabilities in Blender Identified

Technology has evolved in incredible ways that has helped people to create and visualize media like never before. Today, people can use tools such as Blender to visualize, model, and animate 3D content, especially since it’s free and open-source software. However, this also make it an attracti…

January 10, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Ruby Rails Gem XSS Vulnerabilities

Talos has discovered two XSS vulnerabilities in Ruby Rails Gems. Rails is a Ruby framework designed to create web services or web pages. Ruby Gems is a package manager for distributing software packages as ‘gems’. The two XSS vulnerabilities were discovered in two different gem packages:…

January 9, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Vulnerabilities in the CPP and Parity Ethereum Client

Talos is disclosing the presence of multiple vulnerabilities in the CPP and the Parity Ethereum clients. TALOS-2017-0503 / CVE-2017-14457 describes a denial of service vulnerability and potential memory leak in libevm. The function is not currently enabled in the default build. This vulnerability on…

January 8, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Meltdown and Spectre

Cisco Talos is aware of three new vulnerabilities impacting Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and ARM processors used by almost all computers. We are investigating these issues and although we have not observed exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the wild, that does not mean that it has not occurred. We hav…