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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

April 20, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Exploit Kit Goes International Hits 150+ Countries

This post authored by Nick Biasini Talos is constantly monitoring the threat landscape and exploit kits are a constantly evolving component of it. An ongoing goal of Talos is to expose and disrupt these kits to protect the average internet user being targeted and compromised. We were able to gain un…

April 20, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Oracle OIT Image Export SDK libvs_pdf XRef Index Code Execution Vulnerability

Talos has recently discovered a vulnerability in Oracle’s Outside In Technology  Image Export SDK which, when exploited, allows an attacker to overflow the heap, leading to arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability lies in the Image Export SDK’s parsing of Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Wh…

April 15, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Widespread JBoss Backdoors a Major Threat

Recently a large scale ransomware campaign delivering Samsam changed the threat landscape for ransomware delivery. Targeting vulnerabilities in servers to spread ransomware is a new dimension to an already prolific threat. Due to information provided from our Cisco IR Services Team, stemming from a…

April 12, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – April 2016

Patch Tuesday for April has arrived with Microsoft releasing their latest monthly set of security bulletins to address security vulnerabilities in their products. This month’s release contains 13 bulletins relating to 31 vulnerabilities. Six bulletins address vulnerabilities rated as critical…

April 11, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Ransomware: Past, Present, and Future

The rise of ransomware over the past year is an ever growing problem. Business often believe that paying the ransom is the most cost effective way of getting their data back – and this may also be the reality. The problem we face is that every single business that pays to recover their files,…

April 8, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Nuclear Drops Tor Runs and Hides

Introduction Exploit kits are constantly compromising users, whether it’s via malvertising or compromised websites, they are interacting with a large amount of users on a daily basis. Talos is continuously monitoring these exploit kits to ensure protection, analyze changes as they occur, and l…

April 7, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

News Flash! Another Adobe Flash Zero-day Vulnerability Spotted in the Wild

In today’s threat landscape, Adobe Flash Player unfortunately remains an attractive attack vector for adversaries to exploit and compromise systems. Over the past year, Talos has observed several instances where adversaries have identified zero-day vulnerabilities and exploited them to comprom…

April 7, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Deep Dive: Exploiting the Apple Graphics Driver and Bypassing KASLR

Cisco Talos vulnerability researcher Piotr Bania recently discovered a vulnerability in the Apple Intel HD 3000 Graphics driver, which we blogged about here. In this post we are going to take a deeper dive into this research and look into the details of the vulnerability as well as the KASLR bypass…

April 4, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Research Spotlight: Enabling Evil for Pocket Change

This post is authored by Tazz.   EXECUTIVE SUMMARY At the end of February, one of the researchers on the team received a solicitation email from a domain reseller, which she reviewed the first week of March.  The email was from Namecheap offering deeply discounted domains for .88 cents. The timing o…