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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 27, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: TeslaCrypt – Decrypt It Yourself

This post was authored by: Andrea Allievi, Earl Carter & Emmanuel Tacheau Update 4/28: Windows files recompiled with backward compatibility in Visual Studio 2008 Update 5/8: We’ve made the source code available via Github here Update 6/9/2016: We’ve released a tool to decrypt any Tes…

April 20, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Upatre – Say No to Drones, Say Yes to Malware

This post was authored by Nick Biasini and Joel Esler Talos has observed an explosion of malicious downloaders in 2015 which we’ve documented on several occasions on our blog. These downloaders provide a method for attackers to push different types of malware to endpoint systems easily and effective…

April 14, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2015: 11 Bulletins Released

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 11 bulletins being released which address 26 CVEs.  The first 4 bulletins are rated Critical and address vulnerabilities wit…

April 9, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: SSHPsychos

This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Matt Olney, & Craig Williams   Introduction Talos has been monitoring a persistent threat for quite some time, a group we refer to as SSHPsychos or Group 93. This group is well known for creating significant amounts of scanning traffic across the Int…

April 6, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Spam Served With a Side of Dridex

This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Kevin Brooks Overview The use of macro enabled word documents has exploded over the last year, a primary example payload being Dridex. Last week, Talos researchers identified another short lived spam campaign that was delivering a new va…

April 2, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Research Spotlight: FreeSentry Mitigating use-after-free Vulnerabilities

This post was authored by Earl Carter & Yves Younan. Talos is constantly researching the ways in which threat actors take advantage of security weaknesses to exploit systems. Use-after-free vulnerabilities have become an important class of security problems due to the existence of mitigations th…

April 1, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Research Spotlight: Project FTR

            Intro Historically, networks have always been at risk for new, undiscovered threats. The risk of state sponsored hackers or criminal organizations utilizing 0-day was a constant, and the best defense was simply to keep adding on technologies to maximize th…

March 30, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Dyre/Dyreza: An Analysis to Discover the DGA

This post was authored by Alex Chiu & Angel Villegas. Overview Banking and sensitive financial information is a highly coveted target for attackers because of the high value and obvious financial implications.  In the past year, a large amount of attention has been centered on Point of Sale (PoS…

March 24, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: The Imperiosus Curse –A Tool of the Dark Arts

Authors: William Largent, Jaeson Schultz, Craig Williams. Special thanks to Richard Harman for his contributions to this post. As consumers, we are constantly bombarded by advertising, especially on the World Wide Web. There is a lot of money to be made either pushing Internet traffic, or displaying…