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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 1, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Round Up for Aug 25 – Sep 1

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

August 31, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Back to Basics: Worm Defense in the Ransomware Age

This post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana The Prequel In March 2017, Microsoft released a security update for various versions of Windows, which addressed a remote code execution vulnerability affecting a prot…

August 30, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Gdk-Pixbuf Vulnerabilities

Today, Talos is disclosing the discovery of two remote code execution vulnerabilities which have been identified in the Gdk-Pixbuf Toolkit. This toolkit used in multiple desktop applications including Chromium, Firefox, GNOME thumbnailer, VLC and others. Exploiting this vulnerability allows an attac…

August 29, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Code Execution Vulnerability in LabVIEW

LabVIEW is a system design and development platform released by National Instruments. The software is widely used to create applications for data acquisition, instrument control and industrial automation. Talos is disclosing the presence of a code execution vulnerability which can be triggered by op…

August 28, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Lexmark Perceptive Document Filters Code Execution Bugs

Overview Talos is disclosing a pair of code execution vulnerabilities in Lexmark Perceptive Document Filters. Perceptive Document Filters are a series of libraries that are used to parse massive amounts of different types of file formats for multiple purposes. Talos has previously discussed in detai…

August 18, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Round-up for Aug 11 – Aug 18

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between August 11 and August 18. 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 behavi…

August 15, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Booters with Chinese Characteristics: The Rise of Chinese Online DDoS Platforms

This post was authored by Dave Liebenberg In the past few months, Talos has observed an uptick in the number of Chinese websites offering online DDoS services. Many of these websites have a nearly identical layout and design, offering a simple interface in which the user selects a target’s host, por…

August 14, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

When combining exploits for added effect goes wrong

Since public disclosure in April 2017, CVE-2017-0199 has been frequently used within malicious Office documents. The vulnerability allows attackers to include Ole2Link objects within RTF documents to launch remote code when HTA applications are opened and parsed by Microsoft Word. In this recent cam…

August 9, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

WinDBG and JavaScript Analysis

This blog was authored by Paul Rascagneres. Introduction JavaScript is frequently used by malware authors to execute malicious code on Windows systems because it is powerful, natively available and rarely disabled. Our previous article on .NET analysis generated much interest relating to how to use…