Threat Research
Little Links, Big Headaches
This post was authored by Earl Carter & Jaeson Schultz. Talos is always fascinated by the endless creativity of those who send spam. Miscreants who automate sending spam using botnets are of particular interest. Talos has been tracking a spam botnet that over the past several months that has bee…
Threat Spotlight: Rombertik – Gazing Past the Smoke, Mirrors, and Trapdoors
This post was authored by Ben Baker and Alex Chiu. Executive Summary Threat actors and security researchers are constantly looking for ways to better detect and evade each other. As researchers have become more adept and efficient at malware analysis, malware authors have made an effort to build mo…
Threat Spotlight: TeslaCrypt – Decrypt It Yourself
This post was authored by: Andrea Allievi, Earl Carter & Emmanuel Tacheau Update 4/28: Windows files recompiled with backward compatibility in Visual Studio 2008 Update 5/8: We’ve made the source code available via Github here Update 6/9/2016: We’ve released a tool to decrypt any Tes…
Threat Spotlight: SSHPsychos
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 Int…
Threat Spotlight: Spam Served With a Side of Dridex
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 va…
Research Spotlight: FreeSentry Mitigating use-after-free Vulnerabilities
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 th…
Threat Spotlight: Dyre/Dyreza: An Analysis to Discover the DGA
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…
Research Spotlight: Exploiting Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities
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…
Talos Discovery Spotlight: Hundreds of Thousands of Google Apps Domains’ Private WHOIS Information Disclosed
This post was authored by Nick Biasini, Alex Chiu, Jaeson Schultz, and Craig Williams. Special thanks to William McVey for his contributions to this post. Table of Contents Overview WHOIS Privacy Protection Why Does This Exist The Issue Implications for the Good/Bad Guys Current State and Mitigatio…