Vulnerability Spotlight: Use-after-free vulnerabilities in Foxit PDF Reader

Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw. Cisco Talos recently discovered multiple use-after-free vulnerabilities in the Foxit PDF Reader. Foxit PDF Reader is one of the most popular PDF document readers currently available. As a... This is only the...

Xanthe - Docker aware miner

By Vanja Svajcer and Adam Pridgen, Cisco Incident Command NEWS SUMMARY Ransomware attacks and big-game hunting making the headlines, but adversaries use plenty of other methods to monetize their efforts in less intrusive ways.Cisco Talos recently discovered a cryptocurrency-mining botnet attack...

Threat Roundup for April 24 to May 1

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between April 24 and May 1. 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: Two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Xcftools

Claudio Bozzato of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Xcftools contains two remote code execution vulnerabilities in its flattenIncrementally function. Xcftools is a set of tools for handling Gimp’s XCF files. The software provides tools to extract information from an XCF file, and the...

Threat Source newsletter (Oct. 24, 2019)

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s Threat Source newsletter — the perfect place to get caught up on all things Talos from the past week. Never assume that a malware family is really dead. We’ve done it time and time again with things like Emotet, and Gustuff is proving it...

NavRAT Uses US-North Korea Summit As Decoy For Attacks In South Korea

This blog post is authored by Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres with contributions from Jungsoo An. Executive Summary Talos has discovered a new malicious Hangul Word Processor HWP document targeting Korean users. If a malicious document is opened, a remote access trojan that we're calling...

Terror Evolved: Exploit Kit Matures

This post is authored by Holger Unterbrink and Emmanuel Tacheau Executive SummaryTalos is monitoring the major Exploit KitsEK on an ongoing basis. While investigating the changes we recently observed in the RIG EK campaigns, we identified another well known candidate: Terror Exploit Kit.Terror EK...

Spinning complex ideas into clear docs with Kri Dontje

Welcome back! This week, we're shining a spotlight on Kri Dontje, a technical writer who's become an essential voice in making Cisco Talos' work understandable for a wide audience. With a background in technical communications and a career that began at a small startup, Kri discusses the importan...

Laura Faria: Empathy on the front lines

What does it take to lead through chaos and keep organizations safe in the digital age? This week, Amy sat down with Laura Faria, an incident commander at Cisco Talos Incident Response, to explore a career built on empathy, collaboration, and a passion for cybersecurity. Laura opens up about her...

Nvidia and Adobe vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed five vulnerabilities in Nvidia and one in Adobe Acrobat. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, all in adherence to Cisco 's third-party vulnerability disclosure policy...

Xoxo to Prague

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I haven't been to Prague in a while, which is a pity. It's a wonderful city -- great people, amazing food. I've visited customers there, held team meetings at the local office shoutout to Petr! and spent some memorable summer days of...

There is no real fix to the security issues recently found in GitHub and other similar software

A recently discovered security issue in GitHub and other, similar, control system products seem to fit into the classic "its a feature, not a bug" category. Security researchers last week published their findings into some research of how deleted forks in GitHub work, potentially leaving the door...

SneakyChef espionage group targets government agencies with SugarGh0st and more infection techniques

Cisco Talos recently discovered an ongoing campaign from SneakyChef, a newly discovered threat actor using SugarGh0st malware, as early as August 2023. In the newly discovered campaign, we observed a wider scope of targets spread across countries in EMEA and Asia, compared with previous...

Rounding up some of the major headlines from RSA

While I one day wish to make it to the RSA Conference in person, Ive never had the pleasure of making the trek to San Francisco for one of the largest security conferences in the U.S. Instead, I had to watch from afar and catch up on the internet every day like the common folk. This at least give...

You’d be surprised to know what devices are still using Windows CE

Windows CE -- an operating system that, despite being out for 27 years, never had an official explanation for why it was called "CE" -- finally reached its official end-of-life period this week. This was Microsofts first operating system for embedded and pocket devices, making an appearance on...

New threat actor targets Bulgaria, China, Vietnam and other countries with customized Yashma ransomware

Cisco Talos discovered an unknown threat actor, seemingly of Vietnamese origin, conducting a ransomware operation that began at least as early as June 4, 2023. This ongoing attack uses a variant of the Yashma ransomware likely to target multiple geographic areas by mimicking WannaCry...

Incident Response trends Q2 2023: Data theft extortion rises, while healthcare is still most-targeted vertical

Cisco Talos Incident Response Talos IR responded to a growing number of data theft extortion incidents that did not involve encrypting files or deploying ransomware, a 25 percent increase since last quarter and the most-observed threat in the second quarter of 2023. In this type of attack, threat...

Threat Source newsletter (Dec. 15, 2022): Talos Year in Review is here

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Its the most wonderful time of the year, and Im not talking about the holidays. The inaugural 2022 Talos Year in Review is here! And its taking over the final Threat Source newsletter of the year. Oh and did we mention were on Mastodo...

Threat Source newsletter (Oct. 27, 2022): I thought we were already aware of supply chain attacks?

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. There are plenty of jokes about whether were "aware" of cybersecurity during National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. But now Im wondering if people are aware of supply chain attacks. I thought we hit the pinnacle of supply chain attac...

Threat Source newsletter (Aug. 25, 2022) — We're still not talking about Ukraine enough

By Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was once the most talked about story in the world. Six months into the conflict, modern attention spans have moved on to other news stories. But Ukraine Independence Day yesterday should...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Vulnerabilities in Alyac antivirus program could stop virus scanning, cause code execution

Jaewon Min of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Blog by Jon Munshaw. Update Aug. 3, 2022: Talos disclosed two new vulnerabilities in the Alyac antivirus software and added their details to this post. Cisco Talos recently discovered out-of-bounds read and buffer overflow vulnerabilitie...

Threat Spotlight: Solarmarker

By Andrew Windsor, with contributions from Chris Neal. Executive summaryCisco Talos has observed new activity from Solarmarker, a highly modular .NET-based information stealer and keylogger.A previous staging module, "d.m," used with this malware has been replaced by a new module dubbed... This i...

A Deep Dive into Lokibot Infection Chain

By Irshad Muhammad, with contributions from Holger Unterbrink. News summary Lokibot is one of the most well-known information stealers on the malware landscape. In this post, we'll provide a technical breakdown of one of the latest Lokibot campaigns.Talos also has a new script to unpack the...

Beers with Talos Ep. #62: Fifty shades of shady

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast episode No. 62 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: If iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing, click here. Recorded Sept. 13, 2019 In one of our "rantier" episodes, the BWT crew dives into the ongoing insidiousness that is...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Remote code execution bug in Antenna House Rainbow PDF Office document converter

Emmanuel Tacheau of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Executive summary A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in Antenna House’s Rainbow PDF when the software attempts to convert a PowerPoint document. Rainbow PDF has the ability to convert Microsoft Office 97-2016 documents into a PDF...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Google PDFium JBIG2 Image ComposeToOpt2WithRect Information Disclosure Vulnerability

Discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos Overview Cisco Talos is releasing details of a new vulnerability in Google PDFium's JBIG2 library. An exploitable out-of-bounds read on the heap vulnerability exists in the JBIG2-parsing code in Google Chrome, version 67.0.3396.99. A specially craft...

Talos Wins The 5th Volatility Plugin Contest With Pyrebox

Talos has won this year's 5th Volatility plugin contest with Pyrebox. Volatility is a well-known open-source framework designed to analyze operating system memory. The framework has existed since 2007. For the previous 5 years they have run a plugin contest to find the most innovative, interestin...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Google PDFium Tiff Code Execution

OverviewTalos is disclosing a single off-by-one read/write vulnerability found in the TIFF image decoder functionality of PDFium as used in Google Chrome up to and including version 60.0.3112.101. Google Chrome is the most widely used web browser today and a specially crafted PDF could trigger th...

CCleaner Command and Control Causes Concern

This post was authored by Edmund Brumaghin, Earl Carter, Warren Mercer, Matthew Molyett, Matthew Olney, Paul Rascagneres and Craig Williams.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...

Vulnerability Spotlight: FreeRDP Multiple Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities discovered by Tyler Bohan of TalosOverviewTalos has discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the FreeRDP product. FreeRDP is a free implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol RDP originally developed by Microsoft. RDP allows users to connect remotely to systems so they can be...

Talos Targets Disinformation with Fake News Challenge Victory

This post was authored by Sean Baird with contributions by Doug Sibley and Yuxi PanExecutive SummaryFor the past several months, the problem of “fake news” has been abuzz in news headlines, tweets, and social media posts across the web. With historical roots in information warfare and...

UAT-11795 deploys novel Starland RAT and bespoke WLDR C2 implant in financially motivated campaign

Cisco Talos is disclosing UAT-11795, a sophisticated, Russian-speaking, financially motivated adversary that has been conducting a malicious campaign targeting users in the U.S. and Europe since at least June 2025. Talos has discovered that the actor in this campaign delivers a Python-based remot...

Newly identified wiper malware “PathWiper” targets critical infrastructure in Ukraine

Cisco Talos observed a destructive attack on a critical infrastructure entity within Ukraine, using a previously unknown wiper we are calling "PathWiper". The attack was instrumented via a legitimate endpoint administration framework, indicating that the attackers likely had access to the...

BlackByte blends tried-and-true tradecraft with newly disclosed vulnerabilities to support ongoing attacks

The BlackByte ransomware group continues to leverage tactics, techniques and procedures TTPs that have formed the foundation of its tradecraft since its inception, continuously iterating its use of vulnerable drivers to bypass security protections and deploying a self-propagating, wormable...

Spammers abuse Google Forms’ quiz to deliver scams

Spammers are exploiting the "Release scores" feature of Google Forms quizzes to deliver email. The emails originate from Googles own servers and consequently may have an easier time bypassing anti-spam protections and finding the victims inbox. Volumes of these messages hovered near noise levels...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Use-after-free condition in Google Chrome WebGL

Cisco Talos recently discovered an exploitable use-after-free vulnerability in Google Chromes Web Graphics Library WebGL. Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser -- and Chromium is the open-source version of the browser that both Google and other software developers use as the basis to buil...

Threat Source newsletter (Aug. 11, 2022) — All of the things-as-a-service

By Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Everyone seems to want to create the next “Netflix” of something. Xbox’s Game Pass is the “Netflix of video games.” Rent the Runway is a “Netflix of fashion” where customers subscribe to a rotation of fancy clothes. A...

Cryptominers, ransomware among top malware in IR engagements in Q4

By David Liebenberg and Kendall McKay. This summer’s most popular malware families were commonly seen, unsophisticated attacks, with phishing being the top infection vector, according to Cisco Talos Incident Response CTIR data. In addition to threat actors repeatedly deploying common threats like...

Beers with Talos Ep. #64: Your problem isn’t complex, it's simply complexity

By Mitch Neff Beers with Talos BWT Podcast episode No. 64 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: If iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing, click here. Recorded Oct. 10, 2019 This episode lives up to its name, by trying to only take on a minimal topic and the...

Threat Source newsletter (Sept. 5, 2019)

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s Threat Source newsletter — the perfect place to get caught up on all things Talos from the past week. By now, nearly everyone has heard of BlueKeep. It definitely sounds scary, with of this talk of wormable bugs and WannaCry. But so far, ...

Registration for the 2019 Talos Threat Research Summit is now open

The Talos Threat Research Summit is officially back. Registration is open now for the second year of our conference by defenders, for defenders. Tickets sold out quickly last year for our inaugural event, so act quickly. This year’s Research Summit will take place on June 9 in San Diego, Calif. —...

Cyber Security Week in Review (Feb. 15, 2019)

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 Email provider VFEmail says i...

Year in Malware 2018: The most prominent threats Talos tracked this year

It was easy to see a wild year coming in cybersecurity. It started with a bang, with Olympic Destroyer targeting the Winter Olympics in February in an attempt to disrupt the opening ceremonies. Things only got crazier from there, with cryptocurrency miners popping up everywhere, and VPNFilter...

Playback: A TLS 1.3 Story

Introduction Secure communications are one of the most important topics in information security, and the Transport Layer Security TLS protocol is currently the most used protocol to provide secure communications on the internet. For example, when you are connecting to your online banking...

Threat Roundup for April 20-27

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between April 20 and 27. 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: Moxa AWK-3131A Multiple Features Login Username Parameter OS Command Injection Vulnerability

This vulnerability is discovered by Patrick DeSantis and Dave McDaniel of Cisco Talos Today, Talos is disclosing TALOS-2017-0507 CVE-2017-14459, a vulnerability that has been identified in Moxa AWK-3131A industrial wireless access point. The Moxa AWK-3131A Industrial IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n wireless...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Kakadu SDK Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic and Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos.Today, Talos is disclosing multiple vulnerabilities that have been identified in the Kakadu JPEG 2000 SDK. The vulnerabilities manifest in a way that could be exploited if a user opens a specifically crafted JPEG 2000...

Dissecting the JWR phishing framework

Cisco Talos recently identified an undocumented phishing framework, internally branded "JWR" by its developer, built to convincingly impersonate checkout and login pages across major payment and shopping platforms. The client engine of the JWR phishing framework is a real-time, operator-driven...

Chaos ransomware's msaRAT: Living off the browser to build a covert C2 channel

Cisco Talos has discovered a new Rust-based remote access trojan RAT we call "msaRAT" attributed to the Chaos ransomware group. The name is derived from the binding names found in the binary: "msaOpen," "msaClose," "msaError," and "msaMessage". msaRAT is implemented using the Tokio asynchronous...

Active exploitation of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN by UAT-8616

Cisco Talos is tracking the active exploitation of CVE-2026-20127, a vulnerability in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller, formerly vSmart, that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on the affected system by sending a crafted request...