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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

September 15, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Round Up for Sept 8 – Sept 15

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between September 08 and September 15. 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…

September 14, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Deep Dive in MarkLogic Exploitation Process via Argus PDF Converter

This post authored by Marcin Noga with contributions from William Largent Introduction Talos discovers and responsibly discloses software vulnerabilities on a regular basis. Occasionally we publish a deep technical analysis of how the vulnerability was discovered or its potential impact. In a previo…

September 14, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: YAML Parsing Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities in Ansible Vault and Tablib.

Talos is disclosing the presences of remote code execution vulnerabilities in the processing of Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) content in Ansible Vault and Tablib. Attackers can exploit these vulnerabilities through supplying malicious YAML content to execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable sys…

September 13, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: LibOFX Tag Parsing Code Execution Vulnerability

This vulnerability was discovered by Cory Duplantis of Talos Update 9/20/2017: A patch is now available to fix this issue. Overview LibOFX is an open source implementation of OFX (Open Financial Exchange) an open format used by financial institutions to share financial data with clients. As an imple…

September 12, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – September 2017

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 81 new vulnerabilities with 27 of them rated critical, 52 rated important, and 2 rated moderate. These vulnerab…

September 11, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: TALOS-2017-0430/0431: Multiple Vulnerabilities in FreeXL Library

Talos has discovered two remote code execution vulnerabilities in the the FreeXL library. FreeXL is an open source C library to extract valid data from within an Excel (.xls) spreadsheet. Exploiting these vulnerabilities can potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim’…

September 7, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Another Apache Struts Vulnerability Under Active Exploitation

This post authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Alex Chiu. Earlier this week, a critical vulnerability in Apache Struts was publically disclosed in a security advisory. This new vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-9805, manifests due to the way the REST plugin uses XStreamHandler with a…

September 6, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Content Security Policy bypass in Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Apple Safari

The vulnerabilities were discovered by Nicolai Grødum of Cisco. Today, Talos is releasing details of vulnerabilities discovered in Microsoft Edge browser as well as older versions of Google Chrome (CVE-2017-5033) and browsers based on the Webkit such as Apple Safari (CVE-2017-2419). An attacker may…

September 5, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Graftor – But I Never Asked for This…

Overview Free software often downloaded from large freeware distribution sites is a boon for the internet, providing users with functionality that otherwise they would not be able to use. Often users, happy that they are getting something free, fail to pay attention to the hints in the licence agree…