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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

August 25, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Malware Meets SysAdmin – Automation Tools Gone Bad

This post was authored by Alex Chiu and Xabier Ugarte Pedrero. Talos recently spotted a targeted phishing attack with several unique characteristics that are not normally seen. While we monitor phishing campaigns used to distribute threats such as Dridex, Upatre, and Cryptowall, targeted phishing at…

August 18, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Internet Explorer Out of Band Advisory

Today an out of band advisory was released by Microsoft to address CVE-2015-2502. This vulnerability is addressed by MS15-093. MS15-093 address a memory corruption vulnerability in Internet Explorer versions 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. This affects all currently supported versions of Windows, including Wi…

August 13, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Identifies Multiple Memory Corruption Issues in Quicktime

Update 2015-08-21: This post has been updated to reflect an additional advisory released on August 20. Talos, in conjunction with Apple’s security advisories issued on August 13 and August 20, has released six advisories for vulnerabilities that Talos found in Apple Quicktime. In accordance with our…

August 11, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – August 2015

Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release sees a total of 14 bulletins released which address 58 CVEs. Four bulletins are rated “Critical” this month and address vulnerabilities…

August 8, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Research Spotlight: Detecting Algorithmically Generated Domains

This post was authored by Mahdi Namazifar and Yuxi Pan Once a piece of malware has been successfully installed on a vulnerable system one of the first orders of business is for the malware to reach out to the remote command-and-control (C&C) servers in order to receive further instructions, upda…

July 31, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Your Files Are Encrypted with a “Windows 10 Upgrade”

This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Craig Williams & Alex Chiu Update 8/1: To see a video of this threat in action click here Adversaries are always trying to take advantage of current events to lure users into executing their malicious payload. These campaigns are usu…

July 17, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Total Commander FileInfo Plugin Denial of Service

Talos is releasing an advisory for multiple vulnerabilities that have been found within the Total Commander FileInfo Plugin. These vulnerabilities are local denial of service flaws and have been assigned CVE-2015-2869. In accordance with our Vendor Vulnerability Reporting and Disclosure policy, thes…

July 14, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – July 2015

Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release sees a total of 14 bulletins being released which address 57 CVEs. Four of the bulletins are listed as Critical and address vulnerabilities i…

July 8, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Ding! Your RAT has been delivered

This post was authored by Nick Biasini Talos is constantly observing malicious spam campaigns delivering various different types of payloads. Common payloads include things like Dridex, Upatre, and various versions of Ransomware. One less common payload that Talos analyzes periodically are Remote Ac…