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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

June 30, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: Apple Quicktime Corrupt stbl Atom Remote Code Execution

This post was authored by Rich Johnson, William Largent, and Ryan Pentney. Earl Carter contributed to this post. Cisco Talos, in conjunction with Apple’s security advisory issued on June 30th,  is disclosing the discovery of a remote code execution vulnerability within Apple Quicktime. This vulnerab…

June 24, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Hook, Line & Sinker: Catching Unsuspecting Users Off Guard

This post was authored by Earl Carter. Attackers are constantly looking for ways to monetize their malicious activity. In many instances this involves targeting user data and accounts. Talos continues to see phishing attacks targeting customers of multiple high profile financial institutions.  In th…

June 16, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Domain Shadowing Goes Nuclear: A Story in Failed Sophistication

This post was authored by Nick Biasini Exploit Kits are constantly altering their techniques to compromise additional users while also evading detection. Talos sees various campaigns start and stop for different exploit kits all the time. Lately a lot of focus has been put on Angler, and rightly so…

June 9, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – June 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 8 bulletins being released which address 45 CVE. Two of the bulletins are listed as Critical and address vulnerabilities in I…

June 5, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

My Resume Protects All Your Files

This post was authored by Nick Biasini Talos has found a new SPAM campaign that is using multiple layers of obfuscation to attempt to evade detection.  Spammers are always evolving to get their messages to the end users by bypassing SPAM filters while still appearing convincing enough to get a user…

June 5, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Angler EK: More Obfuscation, Fake Extensions, and Other Nonsense

This post was authored by Nick Biasini Late last week Talos researchers noticed a drastic uptick in Angler Exploit Kit activity. We have covered Angler previously, such as the discussion of domain shadowing. This exploit kit evolves on an almost constant basis. However, the recent activity caught ou…

May 20, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Little Links, Big Headaches

This post was authored by Earl Carter & Jaeson Schultz. Talos is always fascinated by the endless creativity of those who send spam. Miscreants who automate sending spam using botnets are of particular interest. Talos has been tracking a spam botnet that over the past several months that has bee…

May 12, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – May 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 13 bulletins being released which address 48 CVEs. Three of the bulletins are listed as Critical and address vulnerabilities…

May 4, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Rombertik – Gazing Past the Smoke, Mirrors, and Trapdoors

This post was authored by Ben Baker and Alex Chiu. Executive Summary Threat actors and security researchers are constantly looking for ways to better detect and evade each other.  As researchers have become more adept and efficient at malware analysis, malware authors have made an effort to build mo…