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 within Internet Explorer, Office, IIS, and Graphics Component. The remaining 7 bulletins are rated Important and cover vulnerabilities within SharePoint, Task Scheduler, Windows, XML Core Services, Active Directory, .NET, and Hyper-V. (more…)

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 Internet. Although our research efforts help inform and protect Cisco customers globally, sometimes it is our relationships that can multiply this impact. Today Cisco and Level 3 Communications took action to help ensure a significantly larger portion of the Internet is also protected.

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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 variant of Dridex. This particular campaign lasted less than five hours and was successful at mutating the subject and attachments to avoid detection. The five hour campaign actually consisted of two separate emails that both had malicious word documents as attachments. A sample of the two different subject lines are shown below.

Campaign One Subject:
Debit Note [97994] information attached to this email

Campaign Two Subject:
48142 – Your Latest Documents from RS Components 822379272

*Note: Italicized text used to identify mutating portions of email subject

Both campaigns centered on invoices being sent as word document attachments. Not only did the attackers use different subjects for every email they also rarely reused an attachment name. Less than five percent of the emails observed contained re-used attachment names.

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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 that protect against other types of vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflows. Today, Talos is releasing FreeSentry, a mitigation for use-after-free vulnerabilities.

FreeSentry works as a plugin for LLVM with an associated runtime library that tracks pointers when they are set to objects and invalidates them when the memory associated with that object is freed. Our initial approach was published at the 2015 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium in February. The paper can be downloaded here. At CanSecWest 2015, Yves Younan of Talos presented an enhanced version of FreeSentry which included further developments, such as porting the original mitigation from C Intermediate Language (CIL) to LLVM. The CanSecWest slides are available here. Note that the LLVM performance numbers in the CanSecWest presentation were preliminary numbers, and have been updated for this post.

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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 the odds of detecting the new threat – like adding more locks to the door if you will. Here at Cisco Talos we’re constantly pushing the envelope. Recently after some thinking juice we started brainstorming ways to better address the constant threat of attacker utilizing unknown 0-day. Today, we’re happy to inform our customer base about our new inspection technology code name project Faster Than Realtime, or FTR. Project FTR is the next generation of detection technology, that which will truly revolutionize the industry.

Project FTR

To mitigate the ever-growing threat of new and unknown attacks we simply decided to add a few options to our existing inspection infrastructure. Snort’s new Quantum Pre-Detection (QPD) leverages Predictive Attack Detection (PAD) by putting packets into an Ethereally-Buffered Capture (EBC) file.  Snort then reads the .ebc via PAD so that QPD can tell you that you are under attack before you’re even under attack.

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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) malware due to its major role in the compromise of several retailers.  While PoS malware is a major concern, attackers have also realized that targeting individual end users is an effective method of harvesting other types of financial data.  As a result, banking malware has become a prevalent category of malware that poses a major threat to users and organizations of all sizes.  One of the more well known examples of banking malware is Zeus.

Table of Contents

Overview
Technical Analysis
Domain Generation Algorithm
Other Thoughts
Conclusion
Appendix

Banking malware typically operates by redirecting users to malicious phishing sites where victim’s input their banking credentials thinking they are logging into their bank’s website.  Banking malware can also operate more stealthily by hooking into a browser’s functionality, capturing the victim’s credentials as they are typed in, and exfiltrating them.  Once an attacker has a victim’s banking credentials, attackers can then sell it or use it to perform illicit transactions (such as transferring funds to another account on behalf of the victim). (more…)

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 ads to consumers. Total annual Internet advertising revenue from 2013 was over US $117bn, and will approach US $200bn by the year 2018. The online advertising industry field is already awash with many players, each clamoring for a piece of the Internet advertising pie. In fact, so many ad impressions are bought and sold daily, that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of who is buying and selling what. 

On one side of the online advertising spectrum are publishers. These are domains that receive Internet traffic and make money by displaying advertisements. On the other side of the spectrum we find advertisers who wish to sell products. And in the middle are ad-networks/ad-exchanges: marketplaces where publishers and advertisers can come together to wheel-and-deal on ad impressions. The astonishingly large number of online advertising industry middlemen between buyers and sellers creates terrific opportunities for bad actors to hide. The result is malware delivered through the online advertising ecosystem, A.K.A. “malvertising”.

How do malicious ads actually make it to end users? In our attempt to answer that question, Talos has uncovered a piece of Internet malvertising infrastructure that is both highly robust, and highly anonymized. It has been an Internet fixture for almost a sesquidecade, with redirection domains operating since early 2001. This infrastructure was designed specifically to focus Internet traffic towards advertising endpoints, unfortunately with little regard paid to legitimacy of the final destination. 
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This post was authored by Andrea Allievi, Ben Baker, Nick Biasini, JJ Cummings, Douglas Goddard, William Largent, Angel Villegas, and Alain Zidouemba

Cisco’s Security Solutions (CSS) consists of information security experts with a unique blend of law enforcement, enterprise security and technology security backgrounds. The team works directly with Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group to identify known and unknown threats, quantify and prioritize risk, and minimize future risk.

When consumers make purchases from a retailer, the transaction is processed through Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems. When a credit or debit card is used, a PoS system is used to read the information stored on the magnetic stripe on the back of the credit card. Once this information gets stolen from a merchant, it can be encoded into a magnetic stripe and used with a new card. Criminal markets exist for this valuable information because the attackers are able to easily monetize stolen credit card data. Incidents involving PoS malware have been on the rise, affecting many large organizations as well as small mom-and-pop establishments and garnering a lot of media attention. The presence of large amounts of financial and personal information ensures that these companies and their retail PoS systems will remain attractive targets.

Overview

There is a new malware family targeting PoS systems, infecting machines to scrape memory for credit card information and exfiltrate that data to servers, also primarily .ru TLD, for harvesting and likely resale. This new malware family, that we’ve nicknamed PoSeidon, has a few components to it, as illustrated by the diagram below:

At a high level, it starts with a Loader binary that upon being executed will first try to maintain persistence on the target machine in order to survive a possible system reboot. The Loader then contacts a command and control server, retrieving a URL which contains another binary to download and execute. The downloaded binary, FindStr, installs a keylogger and scans the memory of the PoS device for number sequences that could be credit card numbers. Upon verifying that the numbers are in fact credit card numbers, keystrokes and credit card numbers are encoded and sent to an exfiltration server.

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This blog 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. Yves Younan of Talos will be presenting at CanSecWest on Friday March 20th. The topic of his talk will be FreeSentry, a software-based mitigation technique developed by Talos to protect against exploitation of use-after-free vulnerabilities. Use-after-free vulnerabilities have become an important class of security problems due to the existence of mitigations that protect against other types of vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflows.

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