Cisco recognized by Forrester as cybersecurity incident response services provider

By Brad Garnett. Cisco Talos Incident Response is proud to announce that Forrester has recognized us by including Cisco in the new Forrester report “Now Tech: Cybersecurity Incident Response Services, Q4 2021.” The Forrester report provides an overview of 36 Cybersecurity Incident Response... Thi...

Case Study: Catching threats ahead of time with a penetration test from the Cisco Talos Incident Response Red Team

By Brad Garnett, Miguel Alvarez Esmoris, Terryn Valikodath and Bob Doyle. As we mentioned in a previous case study, relationships are tried and tested during incident response. So, when a customer came to Cisco Talos Incident Response with concerns about their public-facing website, CTIR knew...

Beers with Talos, Ep. #111: We say goodbye to Craig and his killer robots

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast episode No. 111 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Spotify StitcherIf iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing, click here. We apologize for holding onto this... This is only the beginning! Please...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Nov. 2021 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

By Jon Munshaw and Tiago Pereira. Microsoft released its monthly security update Tuesday, disclosing 56 vulnerabilities in the company’s various software, hardware and firmware offerings, including one that’s actively being exploited in the wild. November’s security update... This is only the...

The features all Incident Response Plans need to have

By Paul Lee, Yuri Kramarz and Martin Lee. Adversaries are always growing their capabilities and changing their tactics, leading to a greater number of incidents and data breaches. This is supported by organizations such as ITRC who reports that the number of data breaches in 2021 is already...

Talos Takes Ep. #73 (NCSAM edition): Fight the phish from land, sea and air

By Jon Munshaw. 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. Most people may think of spam as being the classic email promising that you've won the lottery or some great prize,... Thi...

Threat Source newsletter (Sept. 30, 2021)

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw.Good afternoon, Talos readers. In the latest example of attackers trying to capitalize on current headlines, we've spotted a group using the recent fervor around the Pegasus spyware to spread malware. We've detailed a campaign in which the... This is only the...

Threat Roundup for September 10 to September 17

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Sept. 10 and Sept. 17. 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... This is on...

Talos Takes Ep. #68: The various pivots and pitfalls in a malware investigation

By Jon Munshaw. 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. On this week's episode, Vitor Ventura from our research team walks through his recent work on connecting several... This i...

Threat Roundup for September 3 to September 10

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Sept. 3 and Sept. 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...

Talos Takes Ep. #67: What a leaked playbook tells us about the Conti ransomware group

By Jon Munshaw. 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. There's a lot to take apart in the recently leaked Conti ransomware playbook. After a disgruntled member of the... This is...

Domain dumpster diving

By Jaeson Schultz. Dumpster diving — searching through the trash looking for items of value — has long been a staple of hacking culture. In the 1995 movie "Hackers," Acid Burn and Crash Override are seen dumpster diving for information they can use to help them "hack the Gibson." Of course, not a...

Threat Roundup for January 29 to February 5

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Jan. 29 and Feb. 5. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threatsx we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics...

Back from vacation: Analyzing Emotet’s activity in 2020

By Nick Biasini, Edmund Brumaghin, and Jaeson Schultz. Emotet is one of the most heavily distributed malware families today. Cisco Talos observes large quantities of Emotet emails being sent to individuals and organizations around the world on an almost daily basis. These emails are typically sen...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Denial of service in AMD ATIKMDAG.SYS driver

Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw.Cisco Talos recently discovered a denial-of-service vulnerability in the ATIKMDAG.SYS driver for some AMD graphics cards. An attacker could send the victim a specially crafted D3DKMTCreateAllocation API request to cause...

LodaRAT Update: Alive and Well

By Chris Neal. During our continuous monitoring of LodaRAT, Cisco Talos observed changes in the threat that add new functionality. Multiple new versions of LodaRAT have been spotted being used in the wild.These new versions of LodaRAT abandoned their previous obfuscation techniques.Direct...

Threat Source newsletter for Sept. 24, 2020

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw. Good afternoon, Talos readers. After months years? in beta, an official release candidate is out now for Snort 3. Stay tuned for an officially official release in about a month. In other Snort rules, we also have a deep dive into our detection and prevention of...

Threat Roundup for September 4 to September 11

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Sept. 4 and Sept. 11. 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...

Quarterly Report: Incident Response trends in Summer 2020

By David Liebenberg and Caitlin Huey. For the fifth quarter in a row, Cisco Talos Incident Response CTIR observed ransomware dominating the threat landscape. Infections involved a wide variety of malware families including Ryuk, Maze, LockBit, and Netwalker, among others. In a continuation of...

Threat Roundup for August 21 to August 27

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Aug. 21 and Aug. 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...

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...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Google Chrome PDFium memory corruption vulnerability

Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw. The PDF renderer inside Google Chrome, known as PDFium, contains a memory corruption vulnerability that could be exploited by an adversary. PDFium is open-source software that is utilized in the Chrome browser a...

Updates to Snort setup guides

Our documentation on Snort 3 running on CentOS and the Snort Rules Writing guide to Snort 3. Thanks to community member Yaser for providing the updates. The Snort 3 guide now has expanded information on logging options — such as syslog and JSON. There is also a new performance optimization sectio...

Threat Roundup for June 22-29

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between June 22 and June 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 behavioral characteristic...

Beers with Talos EP27: Smart Install, Vuln Process Realities, and Professional Wrestling

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast Episode 27 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: If iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing: www.talosintelligence.com/podcast EP27 Show Notes: Recorded 4/13/18 - We just upgraded all our gear, so naturally we had a straight tech...

Olympic Destroyer Takes Aim At Winter Olympics

This blog post is authored by Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres. Ben Baker and Matthew Molyett contributed to this post. Update 2/13 08:30 We have updated the information regarding the use of stolen credentials Update 2/12 12:00: We have updated the destructor section with action taken against...

Beers with Talos EP 21: How to Hire the Best, Attribution Without Apaches is Useless

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast Episode 21 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: If iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing: www.talosintelligence.com/podcast EP21 Show Notes: It is a packed episode this time! We are joined by Edmund from the Talos Outreach Grou...

Beers with Talos EP 17: Greek Gods, Trojans, and the Spice Girls as Spirit Animals

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast Episode 17 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos:img bo...

Begun, the Patch Wars have

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. We all knew, to some degree or another, that this summer was going to a hot mess. I don't mean FIFA drama or record setting heat waves. I mean the slow but steady momentum that AI frontier models were accruing for vulnerability...

The Trojan horse of cybercrime: Weaponizing SaaS notification pipelines

By Diana Brown Cisco Talos has recently observed an increase in activity that is leveraging notification pipelines in popular collaboration platforms to deliver spam and phishing emails. These emails are transmitted using the legitimate mail delivery infrastructure associated with GitHub and Jira...

Brushstrokes and breaches with Terryn Valikodath

Cisco Talos is kicking off the new year with a behind-the-scenes look at incident response through the eyes of Terryn Valikodath, Senior Incident Response Consultant at Talos. In this episode, Amy sits down with Terryn to explore the realities of a job that blends technical know-how with...

What happened in Vegas (that you actually want to know about)

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Last week I flew 5,000 miles to Las Vegas for Black Hat USA. After navigating the casino carpet labyrinth and finding the only venue in Nevada that serves a proper English breakfast tea with milk lifesaver, I've decided Black Hat fee...

IR Trends Q2 2025: Phishing attacks persist as actors leverage compromised valid accounts to enhance legitimacy

Phishing remained the top method of initial access this quarter, appearing in a third of all engagements - a decrease from 50 percent last quarter. Threat actors largely leveraged compromised internal or trusted business partner email accounts to deploy malicious emails, bypassing security contro...

State-of-the-art phishing: MFA bypass

Cybercriminals are bypassing multi-factor authentication MFA using adversary-in-the-middle AiTM attacks via reverse proxies, intercepting credentials and authentication cookies. The developers behind Phishing-as-a-Service PhaaS kits like Tycoon 2FA and Evilproxy have added features to make them...

Lessons from Ted Lasso for cybersecurity success

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. "Be curious, not judgmental," Ted Lasso says, misattributing Walt Whitman. We forgive Ted because... well, he's Ted Lasso. If you've not watched the first season of Ted Lasso, there is a defining moment where Ted confronts a nefariou...

Year in Review: Attacks on identity and MFA

For our third focussed topic for Talos' 2024 Year in Review, we tell the story of how identity has become the pivot point for adversarial campaigns. The main themes of this story are credential abuse, Active Directory attacks, and MFA workarounds. Valid account usage was the 1 way attackers got i...

Available now: 2024 Year in Review

Welcome to Cisco Talos' 2024 Year in Review, available for download now. This report is powered by threat telemetry from over 46 million global devices across 193 countries and regions, amounting to more than 886 billion security events per day. Explore key insights in topics including the top...

Small praise for modern compilers - A case of Ubuntu printing vulnerability that wasn’t

By Aleksandar Nikolich Earlier this year, we conducted code audits of the macOS printing subsystem, which is heavily based on the open-source CUPS package. During this investigation, IPP-USB protocol caught our attention. IPP over USB specification defines how printers that are available over USB...

Threat actors use copyright infringement phishing lure to deploy infostealers

Cisco Talos has observed an unknown threat actor conducting a phishing campaign targeting Facebook business and advertising account users in Taiwan. The decoy email and fake PDF filenames are designed to impersonate a company's legal department, attempting to lure the victim into downloading and...

Writing a BugSleep C2 server and detecting its traffic with Snort

In June 2024, security researchers published their analysis of a novel implant dubbed "MuddyRot"aka "BugSleep". This remote access tool RAT gives operators reverse shell and file input/output I/O capabilities on a victim's endpoint using a bespoke command and control C2 protocol. This blog will...

UAT-5647 targets Ukrainian and Polish entities with RomCom malware variants

Cisco Talos has observed a new wave of attacks active since at least late 2023, from a Russian speaking group we track as "UAT-5647", against Ukrainian government entities and unknown Polish entities. UAT-5647 is also known as RomCom and is widely attributed to Russian speaking threat actors in...

The 2024 Threat Landscape State of Play

As we head into the final furlong of 2024, we caught up with Talos' Head of Outreach Nick Biasini to ask him what sort of year it's been so far in the threat landscape. In this video, Nick outlines his two major areas of concern. He also focusses on one state-sponsored actor that has been...

Fuzzing µCOS protocol stacks, Part 2: Handling multiple requests per test case

So far in this series, Ive developed a fuzzer for the µC/HTTP-server. As described in the previous post, this fuzzer reads from a file to enable compatibility with AFL++. That implementation only fuzzes a single request at a time. Although that single request fuzzer uncovered a few security...

A refresher on Talos’ open-source tools and the importance of the open-source community

Open-source software that is free to download, deploy and modify is a vital component in the fight for cyber security. Freely available software not only helps defend systems that would otherwise be unprotected, but it also allows people to learn and develop vital cybersecurity skills. In this...

How do cryptocurrency drainer phishing scams work?

By Teoderick Contreras and Jose Hernandez of Splunk, with contributions from the Splunk Threat Research Team. Cryptodrainer scams have emerged as a significant threat in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, targeting unsuspecting individuals with the promise of easy profits while covertly siphoning thei...

Video: Talos 2023 Year in Review highlights

In this video, experts from across Cisco Talos came together to discuss the 2023 Talos Year in Review. We chat about whats new, whats stayed the same, and how the geopolitical environment has affected the threat landscape. This video was recorded live on social media: Read the 2023 Cisco Talos Ye...

What is the dark web?

Most users interact with the internet through the web, and many of the threat actors we write about operate on the "dark web." Broadly speaking, the dark web is a small portion of the "deep web," where the deep web represents most of the Web. We know, its confusing -- lets walk through an example...

What is commercial spyware?

Weve talked quite a bit about spyware recently, with very good reason. Recently, concerns have grown regarding the rapid growth of commercial spyware tools, and the way in which they are being used against their intended victims. This Need to Know article talk about the broader effects of spyware...

Malicious campaigns target government, military and civilian entities in Ukraine, Poland

Cisco Talos has discovered a threat actor conducting several campaigns against government entities, military organizations and civilian users in Ukraine and Poland. We judge that these operations are very likely aimed at stealing information and gaining persistent remote access. The activity we...

How Talos IR’s Purple Team can help you prepare for the worst-case scenario

Purple Team exercises are included within the Cisco Talos Incident Response Retainer service and our experts can help your organization find security holes before the bad guys can. As your trusted advisor, our purple team, which is a combination of both red and blue teams, emulates one joint atta...