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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

December 15, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Ancient Mac Site Harbors Botnet that Exploits IE Vulnerability

This post was authored by Alex Chiu and Shaun Hurley. Last month, Microsoft released a security bulletin to patch CVE-2014-6332, a vulnerability within Windows Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) that could result in remote code execution if a user views a maliciously crafted web page with Microsoft…

December 9, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Dridex Is Back, then it’s gone again

This post was authored by Armin Pelkmann and Earl Carter. Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group noticed a reappearance of several Dridex email campaigns, starting last week and continuing into this week as well. Dridex is in a nutshell, malware designed to steal your financial account infor…

December 9, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for December 2014: Light Month, Some Changes

This post was authored by Yves Younan. Today, Microsoft is releasing their final Update Tuesday of 2014. Last year, the end of year update was relatively large. This time, it’s relatively light with a total of seven bulletins, covering 24 CVEs. Three of those bulletins are rated critical and four ar…

December 1, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

MS14-063 A Potential XP Exploit

This post was written by Marcin Noga with contributions by Earl Carter and Martin Lee. New vulnerabilities for old operating systems may not seem particularly interesting, until you consider the large number of legacy machines running outdated versions of Windows. Windows XP has reached its end of l…

November 24, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Cisco Coverage for ‘Regin’ Campaign

This post was authored by Alex Chiu with contributions from Joel Esler. Advanced persistent threats are a problem that many companies and organizations of all sizes face.  In the past two days, information regarding a highly targeted campaign known as ‘Regin’ has been publicly disclosed.  The threat…

November 18, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Reversing Multilayer .NET Malware

This post was authored by Dave McDaniel with contributions from Jaeson Schultz Recently, we came across a malware sample that has been traversing the Internet disguised as an image of a woman. The malware sample uses several layers of obfuscation to hide its payload, including the use of steganograp…

November 11, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Update Tuesday November 2014: Fixes for 3 0-day Vulnerabilities

This month Microsoft is releasing 14 security bulletins. Originally they had planned to release 16, but due to issues that emerged in late testing, two bulletins that were announced in the Advance Security Notification, MS14-068 and MS14-075, have been postponed. Of the 14 bulletins, four are consid…

November 7, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Talos Discovered Three More Vulnerabilities in Pidgin

This post was authored by Yves Younan and edited by Armin Pelkmann Table of contents CVE-2014-3697, VRT-2014-0205 CVE-2014-3696, VRT-2014-0204 CVE-2014-3695, VRT-2014-0203 Cisco Talos is announcing the discovery and patching of another three 3 CVE vulnerabilities in Pidgin (An open-source multi-plat…

October 28, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Group 72, Opening the ZxShell

This post was authored by Andrea Allievi, Douglas Goddard, Shaun Hurley, and Alain Zidouemba. Recently, there was a blog post on the takedown of a botnet used by threat actor group known as Group 72 and their involvement in Operation SMN.  This group is sophisticated, well funded, and exclusively ta…