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 5, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Round Up for December 29 – January 5

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between December 29 and January 05. As with previous round-ups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we’ve observed by highlighting key beh…

January 4, 2018

THREAT RESEARCH

Not So Crystal Clear – Zeus Variant Spoils Ukrainian Holiday

This post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin with contributions from Ben Baker, Dave Maynor and Matthew Molyett. Introduction Talos has observed a cyber attack which was launched using the official website of the Ukraine-based accounting software developer Crystal Finance Millennium (CFM). This vector…

December 19, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: VMWare VNC Vulnerabilities

Today, Talos is disclosing a pair of vulnerabilities in the VNC implementation used in VMWare’s products that could result in code execution. VMWare implements VNC for its remote management, remote access, and automation purposes in VMWare products including Workstation, Player, and ESXi which…

December 19, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Virus Bulletin Publication And Presentation

Virus Bulletin conference is a well regarded intimate technical conference focused on malware research. It provides a good balance between listening to technical talks and spending time exchanging experiences with colleagues from different companies; all working on the same task of making our comput…

December 12, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – December 2017

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 34 new vulnerabilities with 21 of them rated critical and 13 of them rated important. These vulnerabilit…

December 8, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Round Up for Dec 01 – Dec 08

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between December 01 and December 08. As with previous round-ups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we’ve observed by highlighting key be…

December 8, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: TALOS-2017-0393 / CVE-2017-2886 – ACDSee Ultimate 10 Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Overview Talos has discovered a remote code execution vulnerability in the ACDSee Ultimate 10 application from ACD Systems International Inc. Exploiting this vulnerabilities can potentially allow an attacker to gain full control over the victim’s machine. If an attacker builds a specially craf…

December 7, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

The Mutiny Fuzzing Framework and Decept Proxy

This blog post is authored by James Spadaro of Cisco ASIG and Lilith Wyatt of Cisco Talos. Imagine a scenario where you, as a vulnerability researcher, are tasked with auditing a network application to identify vulnerabilities. By itself, the task may not seem too daunting until you learn of a coupl…

December 6, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Recam Redux – DeConfusing ConfuserEx

Overview This report shows how to deobfuscate a custom .NET ConfuserEx protected malware. We identified this recent malware campaign from our Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) telemetry. Initial infection is via a malicious Word document, the malware ultimately executes in memory an embedded payload…