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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

July 7, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: TALOS-2017-0311,0319,0321 – Multiple Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Poppler PDF l …

Vulnerability discovered by Marcin Noga, Lilith Wyatt and Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos. Overview Talos has discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the freedesktop.org Poppler PDF library. Exploiting these vulnerabilities can allow an attacker to gain full control over the victim’s machine.…

July 6, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

New KONNI Campaign References North Korean Missile Capabilities

This blog was authored by Paul Rascagneres Executive Summary We recently wrote about the KONNI Remote Access Trojan (RAT) which has been distributed by a small number of campaigns over the past 3 years. We have identified a new distribution campaign which took place on 4th July. The malware used in…

July 5, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

The MeDoc Connection

Summary The Nyetya attack was a destructive ransomware variant that affected many organizations inside of Ukraine and multinational corporations with operations in Ukraine. In cooperation with Cisco Advanced Services Incident Response, Talos identified several key aspects of the attack. The investi…

June 30, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Dell Precision Optimizer and Invincea Vulnerabilities

Talos are releasing advisories for vulnerabilities in the Dell Precision Optimizer application service software, Invincea-X and Invincea Dell Protected Workspace. These packages are pre-installed on certain Dell systems. Vulnerabilities present in these applications could allow attackers to disable…

June 27, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

New Ransomware Variant “Nyetya” Compromises Systems Worldwide

Note: This blog post discusses active research by Talos into a new threat. This information should be considered preliminary and will be updated as research continues. For the most current info, please read our full blog on TalosIntelligence.com. Since the SamSam attacks that targeted US healthcare…

June 23, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Round-up for June 16 – June 23

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between June 16 and June 23. 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…

June 22, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Vulnerabilities in InsideSecure MatrixSSL

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos Overview MatrixSSL is a TLS/SSL stack offered in the form of a Software Development Kit (SDK) that is geared towards application in Internet of Things (IOT) devices and other embedded systems. It features low resource overhea…

June 21, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Player 1 Limps Back Into the Ring – Hello again, Locky!

This post was authored by Alex Chiu, Warren Mercer, and Jaeson Schultz.  Sean Baird and Matthew Molyett contributed to this post. Back in May, the Necurs spam botnet jettisoned Locky ransomware in favor of the new Jaff ransomware variant. However, earlier this month Kaspersky discovered a vulnerabil…

June 20, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Targets Disinformation with Fake News Challenge Victory

This post was authored by Sean Baird with contributions by Doug Sibley and Yuxi Pan   Executive Summary For the past several months, the problem of “fake news” has been abuzz in news headlines, tweets, and social media posts across the web. With historical roots in information warfare and disin…