Andrew Appel on New Hampshire’s Election Audit

Really interesting two part analysis of the audit conducted after the 2020 election in Windham, New Hampshire. Based on preliminary reports published by the team of experts that New Hampshire engaged to examine an election discrepancy, it appears that a buildup of dust in the read heads of...

TLB Poisoning Attacks on AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV)

Bulletin ID: AMD-SB-1023 Potential Impact: Loss of Integrity, Confidentiality and Availability Summary A malicious hypervisor HV along with an unprivileged process controlled by an attacker and executing in a guest VM, may maliciously control the process of flushing the Translation Lookaside Buff...

Speculative Code Store Bypass and Floating-Point Value Injection

Bulletin ID: AMD-SB-1003 Potential Impact: Data Leakage Severity: Medium Summary AMD is aware of research from the VUsec group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and believes that these issues are only exploitable in conjunction with software vulnerabilities related to incorrect speculation of...

Friday Squid Blogging: Underwater Cameras for Observing Squid

Interesting research paper. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Researchers Flag e-Voting Security Flaws

A group of election security experts said after a deep dive into Australia’s electronic voting systems that they have “serious problems” with the accuracy, integrity and privacy with elections run by the Australian Capital Territory ACT Electoral Commission. The team of four cybersecurity...

Fast Random Bit Generation

Science has a paper and commentary on generating 250 random terabits per second with a laser. I dont know how cryptographically secure they are, but that can be cleaned up with something like Fortuna. EDITED TO ADD 3/12: Here are free versions of the paper and the commentary...

Talos Takes Ep. #40: Takeaways from interviewing a ransomware operator

The latest episode of Talos Takes is available now. Download this episode and subscribe to Talos Takes using the buttons below, or visit the Talos Takes page. This week, we have two guests on a Talos Takes first! to discuss our recent research paper on the LockBit ransomware. Two of the authors,...

Threat Source newsletter (Feb. 4, 2021)

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw. Good afternoon, Talos readers. We are excited to finally share this LockBit research paper with you all after months of work. Some of our researchers spoke to a ransomware operator, which provided us insight into a threat actor’s day-to-day goals and tactics. T...

Georgia’s Ballot-Marking Devices

Andrew Appel discusses Georgias voting machines, how the paper ballots facilitated a recount, and the problem with automatic ballot-marking devices: Suppose the polling-place optical scanners had been hacked enough to change the outcome. Then this would have been detected in the audit, and in...

Friday Squid Blogging: Newly Identified Ichthyosaur Species Probably Ate Squid

This is a deep-diving species that "fed on small prey items such as squid." Academic paper. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Check Washing

I cant believe that check washing is still a thing: "Check washing" is a practice where thieves break into mailboxes or otherwise steal mail, find envelopes with checks, then use special solvents to remove the information on that check except for the signature and then change the payee and the...

CVE-2020-11114

u'Bluetooth devices does not properly restrict the L2CAP payload length allowing users in radio range to cause a buffer overflow via a crafted Link Layer packetEquivalent to CVE-2019-17060,CVE-2019-17061 and CVE-2019-17517 in Sweyntooth paper' in Snapdragon Compute, Snapdragon Consumer IOT,...

New Snort, ClamAV coverage strikes back against Cobalt Strike

By Nick Mavis. Editing by Joe Marshall and Jon Munshaw. Cisco Talos is releasing a new research paper called “The Art and Science of Detecting Cobalt Strike.” We recently released a more granular set of updated SNORTⓇ and ClamAVⓇ detection signatures to detect attempted obfuscation and exfiltrati...

The informed voter’s guide to election cyberthreats

Singapore held its most recent general election on July 10 2020, and although they used the electoral system called first-past-the-post FPTP, a scheme favored by the US, UK, and most English-speaking countries, the road leading to Election Day was not without challenges and obstacles. While all...

paper-luxe.com Cross Site Scripting vulnerability OBB-1310845

Following coordinated and responsible vulnerability disclosure guidelines of the ISO 29147 standard, Open Bug Bounty has: &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspa. verified the vulnerability and confirmed its existence; &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspb. notified the website operator about its existence...

Threat Source newsletter for Aug. 27, 2020

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw. Good afternoon, Talos readers. As part of our continued look at election security ahead of the November election, we have another research paper out this week. This time, we’re taking a closer look at disinformation campaigns, popularly known as “fake news.” Th...

Shoring Up the 2020 Election: Secure Vote Tallies Aren't the Problem

With the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election coming up in just two months, cybersecurity concerns are taking center stage for average citizens and politicians. That said, the likelihood of election results being impacted by an attack are slim, security researchers say. The focus should be on other...

Linux/x86 - Egghunter(0x50905090) + sigaction + execve(/bin/sh) Shellcode (35 bytes)

Exploit Title: Linux/x86 - Egghunter0x50905090 + sigaction + execve/bin/sh Shellcode 35 bytes Author: danf42 Platform: Linux/x86 / sigaction2 approach to egghunting as described in the paper "Safely Searching Process Virtual Address Space" by skape The shellcode prepares the registers to start th...

frontierpaperco.com Cross Site Scripting vulnerability OBB-1234908

Following coordinated and responsible vulnerability disclosure guidelines of the ISO 29147 standard, Open Bug Bounty has: &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspa. verified the vulnerability and confirmed its existence; &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspb. notified the website operator about its existence...

Threat Source newsletter for July 16, 2020

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw. Good afternoon, Talos readers. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you read our in-depth research paper on election security. This paper represents four years of hands-on research, interviews and insight into how things have changed since 2016, and what...