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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

March 31, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Lhasa Integer Underflow Exploit

Talos is disclosing the discovery of vulnerability TALOS-2016-0095 / CVE-2016-2347 in the Lhasa LZH/LHA decompression tool and library. This vulnerability is due to an integer underflow condition. The software verifies that header values are not too large, but does not check for a too small header l…

March 23, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

SamSam: The Doctor Will See You, After He Pays the Ransom

Cisco Talos is currently observing a widespread campaign leveraging the Samas/Samsam/MSIL.B/C ransomware variant. Unlike most ransomware, SamSam is not launched via user focused attack vectors, such as phishing campaigns and exploit kits. This particular family seems to be distributed via compromisi…

March 22, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Apple OS X Graphics Kernel Driver Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos is credited with the discovery of this vulnerability.   Cisco Talos, in conjunction with Apple’s security advisory issued on Mar 22, is disclosing the discovery of a local vulnerability in the communication functionality of the Apple Intel HD3000 Graphics kernel drive…

March 21, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Malware Word Search: Identifying Angler’s Dictionary

This post authored by Steve Poulson with contributions from Nick Biasini. Exploit kits are constantly evolving and changing. We recently wrote about some subtle Angler changes but then Angler changed drastically on March 8. In this blog post, we will briefly cover these changes, examining different…

March 16, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Teslacrypt 3.0.1 – Tales from the Crypt(o)!

This post is authored by Andrea Allievi and Holger Unterbrink Executive Summary Ransomware is malicious software that is designed to hold users’ files (such as photos, documents, and music) for ransom by encrypting their contents and demanding the user pay a fee to decrypt their files. Typical…

March 8, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – March 2016

Patch Tuesday for March 2016 has arrived. Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release contains 13 bulletins addressing 44 vulnerabilities. Five bulletins are rated critical and address…

March 1, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Angler Attempts to Slip the Hook

This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Joel Esler and Melissa Taylor Talos has discussed at length the sophistication of the Angler exploit kit. One thing that always makes Angler stand apart is the speed with which they develop and implement new techniques. Whether its doma…

February 29, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Tax Scams Gone International

Tax time in the US is quickly approaching. Everyone should be on the lookout for scams that are designed to trick you out of your money and personal information. The IRS is warning users about an increase in the number of email scams being used this year. However, these attacks are no longer limited…

February 24, 2016

THREAT RESEARCH

Operation Blockbuster: Coverage for the Lazarus Group

The threat landscape is in constant flux. In many situations, the entire security community must work together to combat some of today’s larger threats. Novetta researched a group of malware families that all appear to be related to the same group of threat actors dubbed “The Lazarus Group” (Group 7…