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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

February 12, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Bad Browser Plug-ins Gone Wild: Malvertising, Data Exfiltration, and Malware, Oh my!

This post was authored by Fred Concklin, William Largent,  Martin Rehak,  Michal Svoboda, and Veronica Valeros. During an average day of surfing the web via computer, smartphones, and tablets, we are constantly deluged by advertising. Total annual Internet advertising revenue will approach $200bn by…

February 10, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2015: 56 vulnerabilities fixed

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday for February 2015 has arrived.  This month’s round of security updates is large with Microsoft releasing 9 bulletins addressing 56 CVEs.  3 of the bulletins are rated critical and address vulnerabilities within Internet Explorer, Windows, and Group Policy.  The remaining 6…

February 9, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Cryptowall 3.0: Back to the Basics

This post was authored by Andrea Allievi  & Earl Carter Ransomware continues to impact a large number of organizations and the malware continues to evolve. In January, we examined Cryptowall 2.0 and highlighted new features incorporated into the dropper and Cryptowall binary. When Cryptowall 3.0…

February 3, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Angler Exploit Kit – New Variants

This post was authored by Nick Biasini On January 27th,  Talos researchers began observing a new Angler Exploit Kit (EK) campaign using new variants associated with (CVE-2015-0311). Based on our telemetry data the campaign lasted from January 26th until January 30th with the majority of the events o…

January 28, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

CVE-2015-0235: A GHOST in the Machine

This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Earl Carter, Alex Chiu and Jaeson Schultz On Tuesday January 27, 2015, security researchers from Qualys published information concerning a 0-day vulnerability in the GNU C library. The vulnerability, known as “GHOST” (a.k.a. CVE-2015-0235), is a buffer overflo…

January 23, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Flash 0-day Exploited by Angler Exploit Kit

This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Earl Carter and Jaeson Schultz Flash has long been a favorite target among Exploit Kits (EK). In October 2014 the Angler EK was believed to be targeting a new Flash vulnerability. The bug that the Angler exploit kit was attempting to exploit had been “accident…

January 13, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Update Tuesday January 2015: Another Light Month, No IE Bulletins, More Changes to Reporting

This post was written by Yves Younan. Microsoft’s first Update Tuesday of 2015 is pretty light, there’s a total of eight bulletins, all covering a single vulnerability. Seven of these bulletins are rated as important and just one is rated critical. No bulletin for IE is being released this month. Tw…

January 6, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Ransomware on Steroids: Cryptowall 2.0

This post was authored by Andrea Allievi and Earl Carter. Ransomware holds a user’s data hostage. The latest ransomware variants encrypt the user’s data, thus making it unusable until a ransom is paid to retrieve the decryption key. The latest Cryptowall 2.0, utilizes TOR to obfuscate the command an…

December 17, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Wiper Malware – A Detection Deep Dive

This post was authored by Christopher Marczewski with contributions from Craig WIlliams *This blog post has been updated to include Command and Control IP addresses used by the malware. A new piece of wiper malware has received quite a bit of media attention. Despite all the recent press, Cisco̵…