Threat Roundup for November 5 to November 12

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Nov. 5 and Nov. 12. 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...

Threat Roundup for September 24 to October 1

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Sept. 24 and Oct. 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...

Threat Roundup for September 17 to September 24

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Sept. 17 and Sept. 24. 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...

Threat Source newsletter (Sept. 16, 2021)

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw.Good afternoon, Talos readers. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a rat! We've been tracking a series of trojans targeting the aviation industry, and trying to lure victims in by sending them spam related to flight itineraries and other transportation... This is on...

Lemon Duck spreads its wings: Actors target Microsoft Exchange servers, incorporate new TTPs

By Caitlin Huey and Andrew Windsor with contributions from Edmund Brumaghin. Lemon Duck continues to refine and improve upon their tactics, techniques and procedures as they attempt to maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns.Lemon Duck remains relevant as the operators begin to target... Th...

Cheating the cheater: How adversaries are using backdoored video game cheat engines and modding tools

By Nick Lister and Holger Unterbrink, with contributions from Vanja Svajcer. News summary Cisco Talos recently discovered a new campaign targeting video game players and other PC modders.Talos detected a new cryptor used in several different malware campaigns hidden in seemingly legitimate files...

Beers with Talos Ep. #100: The supersized centennial episode

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast episode No. 100 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos:Apple Podcasts Google PodcastsSpotify StitcherIf iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing, click here. By Mitch Neff. Recorded Jan. 8, 2020. It’s hard to believe that we have mad...

Threat Roundup for September 25 to October 2

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Sept. 25 and Oct. 2. 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 Sept. 3, 2020

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw. Good afternoon, Talos readers. We recently uncovered a series of email campaigns utilizing links to malicious documents hosted on legitimate file-sharing platforms to spread malware. The campaigns distributed various malware payloads including Gozi ISFB, ZLoade...

Beers with Talos EP 32 - Live from Orlando Part 2: Take All the Things Off the Internet

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast Episode 32 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. Ep. 32 show notes: Recorded June 13, 2018 — Still live in Orlando, just this time from the lovely lobb...

BWT EP6: Enter the Talos, But Please Use a Unique Password

LISTEN HERE:Listen via iTunesListen directly on the Talos Podcasts page.Episode Notes:The team discusses how to get into threat intel and join a team like Talos. There are many routes to enter the Talos, but no exits. Seriously, they won’t let me leave. Passwords, vaults, and other access control...

The story behind the intelligence

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Our goal is to get accurate threat intelligence to our audience as quickly as possible, with all the context you need to ask the right questions of your own environment: How at risk are we from this threat? Are we prepared for it? An...

You were onto something with “It’s the Climb,” Miley

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. For my fiancee's 30th birthday, I took her on a weekend trip to Shenandoah National Park - a favorite of ours since we went to a wedding there several years back. We've done several incredible hikes over the years, but one in...

Catan and Mouse

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " I do not know everything; still many things I understand." ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time " Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition." ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door T...

Insights into the clustering and reuse of phone numbers in scam emails

Cisco Talos has recently started to collect and gather intelligence around phone numbers within emails as an additional indicator of compromise IOC. In this blog, we discuss new insights into in-the-wild phone number reuse in scam emails. According to Talos' observations, the ease of API-driven...

Foxit, LibRaw vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed one Foxit Reader vulnerability, and six LibRaw file reader vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, all in adherence to Cisco 's third-party vulnerability...

The n8n n8mare: How threat actors are misusing AI workflow automation

Cisco Talos research has uncovered agentic AI workflow automation platform abuse in emails. Recently, we identified an increase in the number of emails that abuse n8n, one of these platforms, from as early as October 2025 through March 2026. In this blog, Talos provides concrete examples of how...

The democratisation of business email compromise fraud

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Last weekend, I witnessed a crime. Not a notable crime that you might read about in the press, but an unremarkable fraud attempt that nevertheless illustrates how new threat actor capabilities are emerging. I imagine that most people...

You have to invite them in

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I found myself watching the Oscars ceremony in its entirety for the first time in a few years. I'm in the U.K., so I watched it the following day. With next week's Year in Review launch looming and several pieces of content still to...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2026 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

Microsoft has released its monthly security update for March 2026 which includes 79 vulnerabilities, including three that Microsoft marked as "critical." The remaining vulnerabilities listed are classified as "important." Microsoft assessed that exploitation of the three "critical" vulnerabilitie...

Using AI to defeat AI

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Generative AI and agentic AI are here to stay. Although I believe that the advantages that AI brings to bad guys may be overstated, these new technologies allow threat actors to conduct attacks at a faster rate than before. One...

“Good enough” emulation: Fuzzing a single thread to uncover vulnerabilities

A Cisco Talos researcher worked around the limitations of hardware-level Code Read-out Protection RDP on the Socomec DIRIS M-70 gateway by pivoting from physical debugging to a "good enough" emulation approach. By focusing on emulating only the single thread responsible for Modbus protocol handli...

Ryan Liles, master of technical diplomacy

Cisco Talos is back with another inside look at the people who keep the internet safe. This time, Amy chats with Ryan Liles, who bridges the gap between Cisco's product teams and the third-party testing labs that put Cisco products through their paces. Ryan pulls back the curtain on the delicate...

Dissecting UAT-8099: New persistence mechanisms and regional focus

Cisco Talos has identified a new campaign by UAT-8099, active from late 2025 to early 2026, that is targeting vulnerable Internet Information Services IIS servers across Asia with a specific focus on victims in Thailand and Vietnam. Analysis confirms significant operational overlaps between this...

I scan, you scan, we all scan for... knowledge?

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " Upon us all a little rain must fall" -- Led Zeppelin, via Henry Wadsworth Longfellow I recently bumped into a colleague with whom I spent several years working in an MSSP environment. We had very different roles within the...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for January 2026 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

Microsoft has released its monthly security update for January 2026, which includes 112 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 8 that Microsoft marked as "critical". In this month's release, Microsoft observed one of the included "important" vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-20805, as...

Libbiosig, Grassroot DiCoM, Smallstep step-ca vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed vulnerabilities in Biosig Project Libbiosig, Grassroot DiCoM, and Smallstep step-ca. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, all in adherence to Cisco 's third-party...

Socomec DIRIS Digiware M series and Easy Config, PDF XChange Editor vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in PDF XChange Editor, and ten vulnerabilities in Socomec DIRIS Digiware M series and Easy Config products. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their...

Your year-end infosec wrapped

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " They say that a person's personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn't true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we'd never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for November 2025 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

Microsoft has released its monthly security update for November 2025, which includes 63 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 5 that Microsoft marked as "critical." Current intelligence shows that one of the important vulnerabilities, CVE-2025-62215, has already been detected i...

UAT-8099: Chinese-speaking cybercrime group targets high-value IIS for SEO fraud

Cisco Talos is disclosing details on UAT-8099, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group mainly involved in search engine optimization SEO fraud and theft of high-value credentials, configuration files, and certificate data. Cisco's file census and DNS analysis show affected Internet Information Servic...

Cherry pie, Douglas firs and the last trip of the summer

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Diane, 2:01 p.m., August 21st. I've just returned from a remarkable journey through Seattle and the misty roads of the Olympic Peninsula. If you ever find yourself driving beneath those towering Douglas firs or dragged by your partne...

Russian state-sponsored espionage group Static Tundra compromises unpatched end-of-life network devices

Static Tundra is a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group linked to the FSB's Center 16 unit that has been operating for over a decade, specializing in compromising network devices for long-term intelligence gathering operations. The group actively exploits a seven-year-old vulnerability...

Talos IR ransomware engagements and the significance of timeliness in incident response

Cisco Talos routinely responds to ransomware engagements where the impact could have been mitigated or wholly prevented if the victim organization had initiated remediation efforts earlier in the attack lifecycle. The significance of early intervention in ransomware attacks is particularly...

Patch, track, repeat

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. We've made it halfway through 2025 already! It's been a while since I last wrote about CVEs and how free support for Windows 10 will end on October 14, 2025, leaving you with no more security fixes. While the CVE system remains the...

Asus and Adobe vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed two vulnerabilities each in Asus Armoury Crate and Adobe Acrobat products. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, all in adherence to Cisco 's third-party vulnerability...

Scarcity signals: Are rare activities red flags?

By Darin Smith and John Arneson Cisco Talos reviewed six months of network connection telemetry logs spanning June 1, 2024 - Dec. 31, 2024, containing 3,220,829 log events and 742 unique base domains, to explore if domains that PowerShell rarely contacts are more likely to be malicious. Key...

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow: Information security and the Baseball Hall of Fame

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time." - Shakespeare's Macbeth "But I am very poorly today and very stupid and I hate everybody and everything. One...

Sellers can get scammed too, and Joe goes off on a rant about imposter syndrome

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Hello again my friends! Geez, it's been a year am I right? Lemons its February you say?! Oof. Imposter syndrome. You've heard the term I'm sure, but what is it? Basically: imposter syndrome is the persistent feeling of self-doubt and...

Changing the tide: Reflections on threat data from 2024

"Enough Ripples, And You Change The Tide. For The Future Is Never Truly Set." X-Men: Days of Future Past In January, I dedicated some time to examine threat data from 2024, comparing it with the previous years to identify anomalies, spikes, and changes. As anticipated, the number of Common...

Threat actor abuses Gophish to deliver new PowerRAT and DCRAT

Cisco Talos recently discovered a phishing campaign using an open-source phishing toolkit called Gophish by an unknown threat actor. The campaign involves modular infection chains that are either Maldoc or HTML-based infections and require the victim's intervention to trigger the infection chain...

How are user credentials stolen and used by threat actors?

Youve no doubt heard the phrase, "Attackers dont hack anyone these days. They log on." By obtaining or stealing valid user account details, an attacker can gain access to a system, remain hidden, and then elevate their privileges to "log in" to more areas of the network. Unfortunately, the use of...

Legislation alone isn’t enough to stop spyware

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. The use of spyware continues to make headlines across the globe. While primarily used by authoritarian regimes to track potentially sensitive subjects like political opponents or activists, governments from all over the world are guil...

How threat actors are using AI and other modern tools to enhance their phishing attempts

Phishing attacks are increasingly more targeted and customized than in the past. The proliferation of additional communications channels such as mobile devices and social media provides attackers with new avenues to phish users. The technology behind phishing attacks evolves as necessary for...

February 24th

Today marks one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. While there is much we could say, we will simply reiterate our unwavering support of our colleagues, partners, and the people of Ukraine as they defend their country and our hope that peace and comfort come quickly to them. Everything we said one...

Threat Source newsletter (Feb. 2, 2023): I bid you all adieu

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. If you havent noticed yet weve had a few guest writers on this newsletter over the last few months. Alas my time covering the newsletter has ended and I leave you with one final edition. Have no fear, William Largent will be rounding...

Threat Source newsletter (Jan. 5, 2023): Digging out of our inboxes

Happy New Year and welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. We cant tell if its the fog from Lurenes deadly eggnog or dare we say pure rest and relaxation but were still digging out of our inboxes, trying to remember logins, and circle back on all the things we prolonged int...

Threat Source newsletter (Sept. 1, 2022) — Conversations about an unborn baby's privacy

By Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. This week marks about 90 days before my wife’s due date with our first child, a baby girl. We’re both incredibly excited and nervous at the same time, and we have much to discuss, like how to lay out the nursery, what...

Threat Source newsletter (June 30, 2022) — AI voice cloning is somehow more scary than deepfake videos

By Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. We took a week off for summer vacation but are back in the thick of security things now. My first exposure to deepfake videos was when Jordan Peele worked with BuzzFeed News to produce this video of... This is only th...

EMEAR Monthly Talos Update: Wiper malware

Cisco Talos and Cisco Secure are launching a new video series to fill you in on the latest cybersecurity trends. We’re thrilled to launch our first video in the new Talos Threat Update series, which you can watch above or over at this link, where Martin Lee and Hazel Burton talk about wiper... Th...