Talos

October 29, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Domains of the Living Dead

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “If you’re ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you’re ready for any emergency.” While events haven’t yet risen to the level of “zombie apocalypse”, computer attackers are continuing to use their voodoo to zombify Internet domains, an…

October 21, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Cisco Identifies Multiple Vulnerabilities in Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd)

Cisco is committed to improving the overall security of the products and services our customers rely on. As part of this commitment, Cisco assesses the security of software components used in our products. Open source software plays a key role in many Cisco products and as a result, ensuring the sec…

October 20, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Dangerous Clipboard: Analysis of the MS15-072 Patch

This post was authored by Marcin Noga with contributions from Jaeson Schultz. Have you ever thought about how security researchers take a patch that has been released, and then reverse it to find the underlying security issue? Well, back In July Microsoft released security bulletin MS15-072, titled:…

October 13, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Project Aspis

One of the hardest jobs on the Internet is to work the abuse desk at a hosting provider.  These teams have to strike a difficult balance between protecting their customers, ensuring that their services aren’t being abused by malicious actors and delivering the service and convenience their customers…

October 13, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Microsoft Patch Tuesday – October 2015

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday has arrived. Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release is fairly light with a total of 6 bulletins released addressing 33 vulnerabilities. Half of the…

October 6, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: Cisco Talos Thwarts Access to Massive International Exploit Kit Generating $60M Annually From Ransomwa …

This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Joel Esler, Nick Hebert, Warren Mercer, Matt Olney, Melissa Taylor, and Craig Williams. Executive Summary Today, Cisco struck a blow to a group of hackers, disrupting a significant international revenue stream generated by the notorious…

October 2, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Vulnerability Spotlight: MiniUPnP Internet Gateway Device Protocol XML Parser Buffer Overflow

Vulnerability discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos. Post authored by Earl Carter and William Largent Talos is disclosing the discovery of an exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability in the the MiniUPnP library TALOS-2015-0035 (CVE-2015-6031). The buffer overflow is present in client-sid…

September 30, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

Down the Rabbit Hole: Botnet Analysis for Non-Reverse Engineers

This post is authored by Earl Carter & Holger Unterbrink. Overview Talos is often tasked with mapping the backend network for a specific piece of malware. One approach is to first reverse engineer the sample and determine exactly how it operates. But what if there is no time or resources to take…

September 23, 2015

THREAT RESEARCH

SYNful Knock Scanner

This post was authored by William McVey. Update 9/23: We updated the tool to version 1.0.1 Talos is constantly researching the ways in which threat actors are evolving to exploit systems. Recently, a piece of persistent malware coined as “SYNful Knock” was discovered on Cisco routers. While this mal…