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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

February 6, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

When a Pony Walks Out Of A Pub

This blog was authored by Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres. Talos has observed a small email campaign leveraging the use of Microsoft Publisher files. These .pub files are normally used for the publishing of documents such as newsletters, allowing users to create such documents using familiar offi…

January 31, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Cisco Coverage for Shamoon 2

Shamoon is a type of destructive malware that has been previously associated with attacks against the Saudi Arabian energy sector we’ve been tracking since 2012. We’ve observed that a variant of Shamoon, identified as Shamoon 2, has recently been used against several compromised organiza…

January 30, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

EyePyramid: An Archaeological Journey

The few last days, a malware sample named EyePyramid has received considerable attention, especially in Italy. The Italian police have arrested two suspects and also published a preliminary report of the investigation. This malware is notable due to the targeting of Italian celebrities and politicia…

January 27, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Matryoshka Doll Reconnaissance Framework

This post authored by David Maynor & Paul Rascagneres with the contribution of Alex McDonnell and Matthew Molyett Overview Talos has identified a malicious Microsoft Word document with several unusual features and an advanced workflow, performing reconnaissance on the targeted system to avoid s…

January 23, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight – LibBPG Image Decoding Code Execution

Overview Talos is disclosing TALOS-2016-0259 / CVE-2016-8710. An exploitable heap write out of bounds vulnerability exists in the decoding of BPG images in libbpg library. A crafted BPG image decoded by libbpg can cause an integer underflow vulnerability causing an out of bounds heap write leading…

January 20, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Adobe Acrobat Reader DC jpeg Decoder Vulnerability

Discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos Overview Talos is disclosing TALOS-2016-0259 / CVE-2017-2791 an uninitialized memory vulnerability in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. Adobe Acrobat Reader is one of the largest and well known PDF readers available today. This particular vulnerability is asso…

January 18, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Without Necurs, Locky Struggles

This post authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Jaeson Schultz Locky has been a devastating force for the last year in the spam and ransomware landscape. The Locky variant of ransomware has been responsible for huge amounts of spam messages being sent on a daily basis. The main driver beh…

January 18, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Code Execution Vulnerabilities in Oracle Outside In Technology

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos. Summary Oracle’s Outside In Technology (OIT) is a set of SDKs that software developers can use to perform various actions against a large number of different file formats. According to the OIT website: “Outside I…

January 12, 2017

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Exploiting the Aerospike Database Server

Vulnerabilities discovered by Talos Talos is disclosing multiple vulnerabilities discovered in the Aerospike Database Server. These vulnerabilities range from memory disclosure to potential remote code execution. This software is used by various companies that require a high performance NoSQL databa…