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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

November 28, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Cerber Spam: Tor All the Things!

This post authored by Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin with contributions from Sean Baird and Andrew Windsor. Executive Summary Talos is continuously analyzing email based malware always looking at how adversaries change and the new techniques that are being added on an almost constant basis. Recen…

November 28, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Responsible Disclosure Policy Update

Responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities is a key aspect of security research. Often, the difficulty in responsible disclosure is balancing competing interests – assisting a vendor with patching their product and notifying the general public to prevent a 0-day situation. It is uncomfortable t…

November 22, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Fareit Spam: Rocking Out to a New File Type

This post authored by Nick Biasini Talos is constantly monitoring the threat landscape including the email threat landscape. Lately this landscape has been dominated with Locky distribution. During a recent Locky vacation Talos noticed an interesting shift in file types being used to distribute anot…

November 15, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Crashing Stacks Without Squishing Bugs: Advanced Vulnerability Analysis

Overview Crash triaging can be a long and complicated process; by using proper tools and having an optimal approach, we can make this a bit easier and less time consuming. In this post we describe a triaging strategy and toolset based on two examples of vulnerability classes: Stack based buffer ove…

November 8, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – November 2016

Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. For a detailed explanation of each of the categories listed below, please go to https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/gg309177.aspx. This month’s release i…

November 3, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Take the RIG Pill: Down the Rabbit Hole

Executive Summary Talos is monitoring the big notorious Exploit Kits(EK) on an ongoing basis. Since Angler disappeared a few month ago, RIG is one EK which seems to be trying to fill the gap Angler has left. We see an ongoing development on RIG. This report gives more details about the complex infec…

November 2, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Windows 10 Remote Denial of Service

Talos is releasing an advisory for a remote denial of service attack vulnerability in Microsoft Windows 10 AHCACHE.SYS. An attacker can craft a malicious portable executable file, which if accessed causes AHCACHE.SYS to attempt to access out of scope memory. This triggers a bugcheck in the Windows k…

October 31, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Sundown EK: You Better Take Care

This post was authored by Nick Biasini Over the last six months the exploit kit landscape has seen some major changes. These changes began with Nuclear ceasing operations in April/May and arrests in Russia coinciding with the end of Angler in June. Recently, Neutrino has been added to the list of e…

October 25, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: LibTIFF Issues Lead To Code Execution

These Vulnerabilities were discovered by Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos. Talos is releasing multiple vulnerabilities (TALOS-2016-0187, TALOS-2016-0190 & TALOS-2016-0205) in the LibTIFF library . One vulnerability (TALOS-2016-0187) is an exploitable heap based buffer overflow that impacts the LibTI…