Talos
Ransomware: Past, Present, and Future
The rise of ransomware over the past year is an ever growing problem. Business often believe that paying the ransom is the most cost effective way of getting their data back – and this may also be the reality. The problem we face is that every single business that pays to recover their files,…
News Flash! Another Adobe Flash Zero-day Vulnerability Spotted in the Wild
In today’s threat landscape, Adobe Flash Player unfortunately remains an attractive attack vector for adversaries to exploit and compromise systems. Over the past year, Talos has observed several instances where adversaries have identified zero-day vulnerabilities and exploited them to comprom…
Vulnerability Deep Dive: Exploiting the Apple Graphics Driver and Bypassing KASLR
Cisco Talos vulnerability researcher Piotr Bania recently discovered a vulnerability in the Apple Intel HD 3000 Graphics driver, which we blogged about here. In this post we are going to take a deeper dive into this research and look into the details of the vulnerability as well as the KASLR bypass…
Research Spotlight: Enabling Evil for Pocket Change
This post is authored by Tazz. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY At the end of February, one of the researchers on the team received a solicitation email from a domain reseller, which she reviewed the first week of March. The email was from Namecheap offering deeply discounted domains for .88 cents. The timing o…
Vulnerability Spotlight: Lhasa Integer Underflow Exploit
Talos is disclosing the discovery of vulnerability TALOS-2016-0095 / CVE-2016-2347 in the Lhasa LZH/LHA decompression tool and library. This vulnerability is due to an integer underflow condition. The software verifies that header values are not too large, but does not check for a too small header l…
SamSam: The Doctor Will See You, After He Pays the Ransom
Cisco Talos is currently observing a widespread campaign leveraging the Samas/Samsam/MSIL.B/C ransomware variant. Unlike most ransomware, SamSam is not launched via user focused attack vectors, such as phishing campaigns and exploit kits. This particular family seems to be distributed via compromisi…
Vulnerability Spotlight: Apple OS X Graphics Kernel Driver Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos is credited with the discovery of this vulnerability. Cisco Talos, in conjunction with Apple’s security advisory issued on Mar 22, is disclosing the discovery of a local vulnerability in the communication functionality of the Apple Intel HD3000 Graphics kernel drive…
Microsoft Patch Tuesday – March 2016
Patch Tuesday for March 2016 has arrived. Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release contains 13 bulletins addressing 44 vulnerabilities. Five bulletins are rated critical and address…
Bedep Lurking in Angler’s Shadows
This post is authored by Nick Biasini. In October 2015, Talos released our detailed investigation of the Angler Exploit Kit which outlined the infrastructure and monetary impact of an exploit kit campaign delivering ransomware. During the investigation we found that two thirds of Angler’s payl…