CISO Advisory: Security Architecture

Security architecture and design is a vital function of a healthy enterprise. This function is fundamentally, about understanding IT architecture relationships, and ensuring security is a vital element of its implementation. This is the second paper within the series of CISO Advisories, in this...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Investintech Able2Extract

Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw. Cisco Talos recently discovered two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Investintech’s Able2Extract Professional. This software is a cross-platform PDF tool for Windows, Mac and Linux that converts PDFs and allows...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple vulnerabilities in Aspose PDF API

Marcin Noga of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered multiple remote code execution vulnerabilities in the Aspose.PDF API. Aspose provides a series of APIs for manipulating or converting a large family of document formats. These vulnerabilities exist in API...

Cyber Security Week in Review (March 1)

Welcome to this week's Cyber Security Week in Review, where Cisco Talos runs down all of the news we think you need to know in the security world. For more news delivered to your inbox every week, sign up for our Threat Source newsletter here. Top headlines this week Drupal patched a “highly...

DNSpionage Campaign Targets Middle East

This blog post was authored by Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres. Update 2018-11-27 15:30:00 EDT: A Russian-language document has been removed. Subsequent analysis leads us to believe it is unrelated to this investigation. Executive Summary Cisco Talos recently discovered a new campaign targetin...

Vulnerability Spotlight: WellinTech ICS platform vulnerable to information disclosure, buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Carl Hurd of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered two vulnerabilities in WellinTechs KingHistorian industrial control systems data manager. KingHistorian is a time-series database that allows users to ingest and process large amounts of data from ICS,...

Threat Source newsletter (Feb. 16, 2023) — Recapping what we may have missed so far this year

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I am back after more than three months away from Talos on parental leave. Having a baby really resets your expectations for "keeping up" with the world. From November through mid-January or so I had no idea what was going on with the...

Threat Round up for December 9 to December 16

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats weve observed between Dec. 9 and Dec. 16. As with previous roundups, this post isnt meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats weve observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics,...

Lazarus and the tale of three RATs

By Jung soo An, Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura. Cisco Talos has been tracking a new campaign operated by the Lazarus APT group, attributed to North Korea by the United States government. This campaign involved the exploitation of vulnerabilities in VMWare Horizon to gain an initial foothold in...

Threat Roundup for April 3 to April 10

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between April 3 and April 10. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristic...

The commoditization of mobile espionage software

By Matthew Valites with contributions by Joanne Kim and Edmund Brumaghin. Executive summary Mobile stalkerware has all sorts of wide-ranging consequences. The creators of these types of apps can track user's locations, see their social media usage and more. And they certainly open the door for...

Cyber Security Week in Review (March 22)

Welcome to this week's Cyber Security Week in Review, where Cisco Talos runs down all of the news we think you need to know in the security world. For more news delivered to your inbox every week, sign up for our Threat Source newsletter here. Top headlines this week Norwegian aluminum company...

Vulnerability in the Intel Unified Shader compiler for the Intel Graphics Accelerator

Vulnerabilities discovered by Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos Talos is disclosing a pointer corruption vulnerability in the Intel Unified Shader compiler for the Intel Graphics Accelerator. Overview In order for the graphics to be produced, the graphics accelerators need to process the OpenGL scripts...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Apache OpenOffice Vulnerabilities

Discovered by Marcin ‘Icewall’ Noga of Cisco TalosOverviewToday, Talos is releasing details of three new vulnerabilities discovered within Apache OpenOffice application. The first vulnerability, TALOS-2017-0295 within OpenOffice Writer, the second TALOS-2017-0300 in the Draw application, and the...

Threat Spotlight: Follow the Bad Rabbit

Note: This blog post discusses active research by Talos into a new threat. This information should be considered preliminary and will be updated as research continues.Update 2017-10-26 16:10 EDT: added additional information regarding the links between Nyetya and BadRabbitUpdate 2017-10-26 09:20...

The security pitfalls of social media sites offering ID-based authentication

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Since Elon Musk first started talking about purchasing Twitter/X around this time last year, one of his main sticking points has been how many bot accounts are on the platform and how that potentially affects advertising revenue and...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for May 2023 — Fewest vulnerabilities disclosed in a month in three-plus years

Microsoft disclosed 40 vulnerabilities across its suite of products and software Tuesday, the fewest the companys included in a Patch Tuesday since December 2019. However, two of the vulnerabilities is being actively exploited in the wild, according to Microsoft, the fourth month in a row in whic...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Specially crafted files could lead to denial of service, information disclosure in OpenImageIO parser

Lilith of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered three vulnerabilities in the OpenImageIO image-parsing library that many popular pieces of 3-D rendering software use. OpenImageIO is a library that converts, compares and processes various image files. Blende...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Asus router access, information disclosure, denial of service vulnerabilities discovered

Lilith of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered three vulnerabilities in Asus router software. The Asus RT-AX82U router is one of the newer Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax-enabled routers that also supports mesh networking with other Asus routers. Like other routers, it i...

Necro Python bot adds new exploits and Tezos mining to its bag of tricks

By Vanja Svajcer, with contributions from Caitlin Huey and Kendall McKay. News summarySome malware families stay static in terms of their functionality. But a newly discovered malware campaign utilizing the Necro Python bot shows this actor is adding new functionality and improving its chances...

A year of Fajan evolution and Bloomberg themed campaigns

By Vanja Svajcer. News summarySome malware campaigns are designed to spread malware to as many people as possible — while some others carefully choose their targets. Cisco Talos recently discovered a malware campaign that does not fit in any of the two categories. This actor has a relatively low...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple vulnerabilities in Pixar OpenUSD affects some versions of macOS

Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Blog by Aleksandar Nikolic and Jon Munshaw. Pixar OpenUSD contains multiple vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to carry out a variety of malicious actions. OpenUSD stands for “Open Universal Scene Descriptor.” Pixar use...

Vulnerability Spotlight: AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL shader functionality sincos denial-of-service vulnerability

Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw. Cisco Talos recently discovered a denial-of-service vulnerability in a specific dll inside of the AMD ATI Radeon line of video cards. This vulnerability can be triggered by supplying a malformed pixel shader inside a...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Command injection bug in Exhibitor UI

Logan Sanderson of Cisco ASIG discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw. Exhibitor Web UI contains an exploitable command injection vulnerability in its Config editor. Exhibitor is a ZooKeeper supervisory process. Exhibitor's Web UI does not have any form of authentication, and prior to...

Threat Source newsletter (May 30)

Newsletter compiled by Jonathan Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s Threat Source newsletter — the perfect place to get caught up on all things Talos from the past week. Did you update all of your Microsoft products after Patch Tuesday earlier this month? If not, what are you waiting for? Listen to t...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple vulnerabilities in Sierra Wireless AirLink ES450

Carl Hurd and Jared Rittle of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Executive summary Several exploitable vulnerabilities exist in the Sierra Wireless AirLink ES450, an LTE gateway designed for distributed enterprise, such as retail point-of-sale or industrial control systems. These flaws...

Threat Roundup for Feb. 22 to March 1

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Feb. 22 and March 01. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristic...

Threat Roundup for Jan. 25 to Feb. 1

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Jan. 25 and Feb. 01. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics...

Beers with Talos EP44: Fun with 2018’s Worst and Talks We Want to Hear

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast Ep. 44 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: If iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing, click here. Ep. 44 show notes: Recorded Jan. 7, 2019 Most of the episode after an extended roundtable — we all had a lot to get out after tim...

Threat Roundup for Oct. 26 to Nov. 2

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Oct. 26 and Nov. 02. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics...

Threat Round Up for Sept 22 - Sept 29

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between September 22 and September 29. As with previous round-ups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavior...

Vulnerability Spotlight: EZB Systems UltraISO ISO Parsing Code Execution Vulnerability

Discovered by Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos.Today, Talos is releasing details of a new vulnerability discovered within the EZB Systems UltraISO ISO disk image creator software. TALOS-2017-0342 CVE-2017-2840 may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code remotely on the vulnerable system when a...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for January 2023 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

Microsoft released its monthly security update on Tuesday, disclosing 98 vulnerabilities. Of these vulnerabilities, 11 are classified as "Critical", 87 are classified as "Important", no vulnerability classified as "Moderate." According to Microsoft all "Critical" vulnerability are either less...

Threat Source newsletter (Oct. 6, 2022) — Continuing down the Privacy Policy rabbit hole

As I wrote about last week, Ive been diving a lot into apps privacy policies recently. And I was recently made aware of a new type of app I never knew existed -- family trackers. There are countless mobile apps for parents to track their children or other family members based on their location,...

Threat Roundup for Feb. 15 to Feb. 22

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Feb. 15 and Feb. 22. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Vulnerabilities in Cesanta Mongoose Server

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco TalosToday, Talos is disclosing several vulnerabilities that have been identified in Cesanta Mongoose server. Cesanta Mongoose is a library implementing a number of networking protocols, including HTTP, MQTT, MDNS and others. It...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Content Security Policy bypass in Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Apple Safari

The vulnerabilities were discovered by Nicolai Grdum of Cisco.Today, Talos is releasing details of vulnerabilities discovered in Microsoft Edge browser as well as older versions of Google Chrome CVE-2017-5033 and browsers based on the Webkit such as Apple Safari CVE-2017-2419 . An attacker may be...

UAT-10147 deploys SPECTRE: A cross-platform implant with Linux rootkit and BYOVD capabilities

UAT-10147 is a highly capable Chinese-speaking intrusion actor operating a multi-platform post-exploitation ecosystem targeting IIS and Linux servers, combining search engine optimization SEO fraud monetization with advanced persistence and defense evasion techniques. The newly identified SPECTRE...

Fuzzing µC/OS protocol stacks, Part 3: TCP/IP server fuzzing, implementing a TAP driver

This is the final post in the three-part series that details techniques I used to fuzz two µC/OS protocol stacks: µC/TCP-IP and µC/HTTP-server. The first post highlighted code modifications necessary for developing a fuzzing harness tailored for the µC/HTTP-server. The second discussed a techniqu...

Out-of-bounds reads in Adobe Acrobat; Foxit PDF Reader contains vulnerability that could lead to SYSTEM-level privileges

Cisco Talos Vulnerability Research team has helped to disclose and patch more than 20 vulnerabilities over the past three weeks, including two in the popular Adobe Acrobat Reader software. Acrobat, one of the most popular PDF readers currently available, contains two out-of-bounds read...

A new video series, Google Forms spam and the various gray areas of cyber attacks

I found the juxtaposition of stories on the Talos blog over the past week-plus kind of funny. On one hand, we had a massive story about Arid Viper, a Middle Eastern threat actor spreading spyware, one of the most dangerous types of malware out there right now, operating out of Gaza no less. Then,...

Threat Source newsletter (March 23, 2023) — Meta is threatening to ban news sharing in Canada. Good.

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. After asking ChatGPT to write the newsletter for me two weeks ago, I was tempted to have Googles Bard do the same, but I resisted making this the newsletters new gimmick. Instead, I wanted to write about another tech giant -- Meta. Th...

Threat Roundup (Feb. 24 - March 3)

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats weve observed between Feb. 24 and March 3. As with previous roundups, this post isnt meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats weve observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics,...

Threat Source newsletter (July 21, 2022) — No topic is safe from being targeted by fake news and disinformation

By Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I could spend time in this newsletter every week talking about fake news. There are always so many ridiculous memes, headlines, misleading stories, viral Facebook posts and manipulated media that I see come across my...

Talos takes home top research honors at Virus Bulletin conference

By Jon Munshaw Researchers from Cisco Talos brought up the top award at this year’s Virus Bulletin conference. Talos received the Péter Ször Award — named for the prolific security researcher who was a longtime contributor to Virus Bulletin and passed away in 2013 — for our research into several...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Foxit PDF Reader JavaScript Array.includes remote code execution vulnerability

Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Foxit PDF Reader contains a remote code execution vulnerability in its JavaScript engine. Foxit aims to be one of the most feature-rich PDF readers on the market, and contains many similar functions to that of Adobe Acrobat Reader...

Emotet is back after a summer break

By Colin Grady, William Largent, and Jaeson Schultz. Emotet is still evolving, five years after its debut as a banking trojan. It is one of the world's most dangerous botnets and malware droppers-for-hire. The malware payloads dropped by Emotet serve to more fully monetize their attacks, and ofte...

Let's Destroy Democracy

Election security through an adversary's eyes By Matt Olney. Executive summary Over the past few years, Cisco Talos has increasingly been involved in election security research and support, most recently supporting the Security Service of Ukraine in their efforts to secure the two Ukrainian...

Should governments pay extortion payments after a ransomware attack?

By Jonathan Munshaw. When it comes to ransomware attacks this year, it’s been a tale of three cities. In May, the city of Baltimore suffered a massive ransomware attack that took many of its systems down for weeks — restricting employees’ access to email, closing online payment portals and even...

Cisco Talos adds new Content Category

Our goal at Cisco Talos is to provide detailed and actionable information in order to let customers decide how best to protect their networks and users based on their needs. To this end, Cisco Talos is adding a new content category to Talos Intelligence. Starting on April 3, supported Cisco...