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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

August 8, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – August 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 48 new vulnerabilities with 25 of them rated critical, 21 rated important, and 2 rated moderate. These vulnerab…

August 8, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Adobe Reader DC Parser Confusion

Parser vulnerabilities in common software packages such as Adobe Acrobat Reader pose a significant security risk to large portions of the internet. The fact that these software packages typically have a large footprints often gives attackers a broad attack surface they can potentially leverage for m…

August 7, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

On Conveying Doubt

Typically, Talos has the luxury of time when conducting research. We can carefully draft a report that clearly lays out the evidence and leads the reader to a clear understanding of our well supported findings. A great deal of time is spent ensuring that the correct words and logical paths are used…

August 4, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Round-up for July 28 – August 4

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between July 28 and August 04. 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 behavior…

August 4, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Kakadu SDK Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic and Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos. Today, Talos is disclosing multiple vulnerabilities that have been identified in the Kakadu JPEG 2000 SDK. The vulnerabilities manifest in a way that could be exploited if a user opens a specifically crafted JPEG 2000 f…

August 3, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Taking the FIRST look at Crypt0l0cker

This post is authored by Matthew Molyett. Executive Summary In March, Talos reported on the details of Crypt0l0cker based on an extensive analysis I carried out on the sample binaries. Binaries — plural — because, as noted in the original blog, the Crypt0l0cker payload leveraged numerous…

August 2, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: EZB Systems UltraISO ISO Parsing Code Execution Vulnerability

Discovered by Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos Today, Talos is releasing details of a new vulnerability discovered within the EZB Systems UltraISO ISO disk image creator software. TALOS-2017-0342 (CVE-2017-2840) may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code remotely on the vulnerable system when a speci…

July 24, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: FreeRDP Multiple Vulnerabilities

Talos has discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the FreeRDP product. FreeRDP is a free implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) originally developed by Microsoft. RDP allows users to connect remotely to systems so they can be operated from afar. The open source nature of the FreeRDP libr…

July 21, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Round-up for July 14 – July 21

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between July 14 and July 21. 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 behavior c…