Custom dropper hide and seek

Executive summary Most users assume they are safe when surfing the web on a daily basis. But information-stealing malware can operate in the background of infected systems, looking to steal users' passwords, track their habits online and hijack personal information. Cisco Talos has monitored...

Dell ControlVault, Lasso, GL.iNet vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed five vulnerabilities in Dell ControlVault 3 firmware and its associated Windows software, four vulnerabilities in Entr'ouvert Lasso, and one vulnerability in GL.iNet Slate AX. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post...

Best practices for staying safe online during the holiday shopping season

By Jon Munshaw. This holiday shopping season, the basics of avoiding a malware infection boils down to: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. While sometimes retailers do give out small-dollar gift cards, that $500 discount on a new iPhone is probably not real. If it is a scam, it wil...

Threat Roundup for April 26 to May 3

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between April 26 and May 03. 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...

Only one critical issue disclosed as part of Microsoft Patch Tuesday

Microsoft released its monthly security update Tuesday, disclosing 49 vulnerabilities across its suite of products and software. Of those there is only one critical vulnerability. Every other security issues disclosed this month is considered "important." The lone critical security issue is...

New IDA Pro plugin provides TileGX support

By Jonas Zaddach Overview Cisco Talos has a new plugin available for IDA Pro that provides a new disassembler for TileGX binaries. This tool should assist researchers in reverse-engineering threats in IDA Pro that target TileGX. We started developing this tool after the VPNFilter campaign last...

Threat Roundup for August 2 to August 9

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Aug. 2 and Aug. 9. 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: Dovecot out-of-bounds Read Vulnerability

Overview Today, Cisco Talos is disclosing a single out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the Dovecot IMAP server. Dovecot is a popular internet message access protocol, or IMAP, server with performance and security-oriented design. It is a popular choice for robust email servers. In accordance with...

How Tortoiseshell created a fake veteran hiring website to host malware

By Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres with contributions from Jungsoo An. Introduction Cisco Talos recently discovered a threat actor attempting to take advantage of Americans who may be seeking a job, especially military veterans. The actor, previously identified by Symantec as Tortoiseshell,...

Threat Roundup for June 21 to June 28

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between June 21 and June 28. 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 Roundup for November 1 to November 8

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Nov. 1 and Nov. 8. 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,...

Critical vulnerability in ManageEngine could lead to file creation, dozens of other vulnerabilities disclosed by Talos to start 2024

Cisco Talos Vulnerability Research team has disclosed dozens of vulnerabilities over the past month, including more than 30 advisories in GTKWave and a critical vulnerability in ManageEngine OpManager. Cisco ASIG also recently discovered an information disclosure vulnerability in...

Threat Roundup for June 7 to June 14

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between June 07 and June 14. 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 Apple IntelHD5000 privilege escalation vulnerabilities

Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Executive Summary A memory corruption vulnerability exists in the IntelHD5000 kernel extension when dealing with graphics resources inside of Apple OSX 10.13.4. A library inserted into the VLC media application can cause an out-of-bounds...

Watchbog and the Importance of Patching

By Luke DuCharme and Paul Lee. What Happened? Cisco Incident Response CSIRS recently responded to an incident involving the Watchbog cryptomining botnet. The attackers were able to exploit CVE-2018-1000861 to gain a foothold and install the Watchbog malware on the affected systems. This Linux-bas...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities In Insteon Hub PubNub

Vulnerabilities discovered by Claudio Bozzato of Cisco Talos Talos is disclosing twelve new vulnerabilities in Insteon Hub, ranging from remote code execution, to denial of service. The majority of the vulnerabilities have their root cause in the unsafe usage of the strcpy function, leading eithe...

What the continued escalation of tensions in the Middle East means for security

Cisco Talos works with many organizations around the world, monitoring and protecting against sophisticated threats every day. As such, we are watching the current state of events in the Middle East very closely for our customers and partners who may be impacted by the ongoing situation. We are...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Excel

Marcin “Icewall” Noga of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw. Cisco Talos recently discovered a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Excel. Microsoft disclosed this bug as part of their monthly security update Tuesday. This vulnerability exists in the...

Gustuff banking botnet targets Australia

Vitor Ventura authored this post. Executive summary Cisco Talos has uncovered a new Android-based campaign targeting Australian financial institutions. As the investigation progressed, Talos came to understand that this campaign was associated with the "ChristinaMorrow" text message spam scam...

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

Microsoft released its monthly security update Tuesday, disclosing 83 vulnerabilities across the companys hardware and software line, including two issues that are actively being exploited in the wild, continuing a trend of zero-days appearing in Patch Tuesdays over the past few months. Two of th...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday — Nov. 2019: Vulnerability disclosures and Snort coverage

By Jon Munshaw. Microsoft released its monthly security update today, disclosing a variety of vulnerabilities in several of its products. The latest Patch Tuesday discloses 75 vulnerabilities, 13 of which are considered "critical," with the rest being deemed "important." This month’s security...

Hiding in Plain Sight

This blog was written by Jon Munshaw and Jaeson Schultz. Cisco Talos is continually working to ensure that our threat intelligence not only accounts for the latest threats but also new versions of old threats, such as spam. This often means pursuing cybercriminals wherever they congregate. Howeve...

Cisco Coverage for Adylkuzz, Uiwix, and EternalRocks

When the WannaCry attack was launched a little over a week ago, it was one of the first large scale attacks leveraging the data that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers. At the time the real concern was how quickly we would begin to see other threats leverage the same vulnerabilities. Over the past...

Vulnerability Spotlight: TALOS-2017-0311,0319,0321 - Multiple Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Poppler PDF library

Vulnerability discovered by Marcin Noga, Lilith Wyatt and Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos.OverviewTalos has discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the freedesktop.org Poppler PDF library. Exploiting these vulnerabilities can allow an attacker to gain full control over the victim's machine. If a...

Threat Round Up for Nov 10 - Nov 17

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

Threat Roundup for October 19 to October 26

Today, Talos is is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Oct. 19 and Oct. 26. 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...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday — February 2019: Vulnerability disclosures and Snort coverage

Microsoft released its monthly security update today, disclosing a variety of vulnerabilities in several of its products. The latest Patch Tuesday covers 69 vulnerabilities, 20 of which are rated “critical,” 46 that are considered “important” and three that are “moderate.” This release also...

Vulnerability Spotlight: AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL shader functionality remote code execution vulnerability

Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Some AMD Radeon cards contain a remote code execution vulnerability in their ATIDXX64.DLL driver. AMD produces the Radeon line of hardware, which includes graphics cards and graphics processing units. This specific vulnerability exists on...

Vulnerability Spotlight: VMWare VNC Vulnerabilities

Today, Talos is disclosing a pair of vulnerabilities in the VNC implementation used in VMWare's products that could result in code execution. VMWare implements VNC for its remote management, remote access, and automation purposes in VMWare products including Workstation, Player, and ESXi which...

Vulnerability Spotlight: The Circle of a Bug’s Life

OverviewCisco Talos is disclosing several vulnerabilities identified in Circle with Disney. Circle with Disney is a network device designed to monitor the Internet use of children on a given network. Circle pairs wirelessly, with your home Wi-Fi and allows you to manage every device on the networ...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Iceni Infix PDF Editor Memory Corruption

Today, Talos is disclosing a vulnerability that has been identified in Iceni Infix PDF Editor that could lead to arbitrary code execution on affected hosts. This vulnerability manifests in a way that could be exploited if a user opens a specifically crafted PDF file that triggers this flaw. Talos...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple vulnerabilities in Atlassian Jira

Ben Taylor of Cisco ASIG discovered these vulnerabilities. Atlassian’s Jira software contains multiple vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to carry out a variety of actions, including the disclosure of sensitive information and the remote execution of JavaScript code. Jira is a piece of...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple bugs in OpenWeave and Nest Labs Nest Cam IQ indoor camera

Lilith Wyatt and Claudio Bozzato of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the Nest Cam IQ Indoor camera. One of Nest Labs’ most advanced internet-of-things devices, the Nest Cam IQ Indoor integrates Security-Enhanced Linux in...

Threat Source (May 2, 2019)

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. If you haven’t yet, there’s still time to register for this year’s Talos Threat Research Summit — our second annual conference by...

Remote code execution vulnerabilities found in Buildroot, Foxit PDF Reader

Cisco Talos has disclosed 10 vulnerabilities over the past two weeks, including nine that exist in a popular online PDF reader that offers a browser plugin. Attackers could exploit these vulnerabilities in the Foxit PDF Reader to carry out a variety of malicious actions, but most notably could ga...

REvil ransomware actors attack Kaseya in supply chain attack

Updated on July 6, 2021: As analysis of the ransomware attack affecting organizations using Kaseya VSA has continued, we are sharing an update containing additional information. As new details are identified, this information may be updated as needed. This event consisted of two separate, but...

Threat Roundup for June 1-15

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between June 01 and June 15. 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...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Code Execution Vulnerability in LabVIEW

Vulnerability discovered by Cory Duplantis of Cisco Talos.Update: 9/1/17 - National Instruments has published the following advisoryOverviewLabVIEW is a system design and development platform released by National Instruments. The software is widely used to create applications for data acquisition...

Threat Roundup for January 17 to January 24

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

Threat Source newsletter (Jan. 9, 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. We’re back after a long break for the holidays. And 2020 is already off to a fast start as tensions continue to rise in the Middle East...

The sights and sounds from the Talos Threat Research Summit

More than 250 threat hunters, network defenders and analysts gathered ahead of Cisco Live for the second annual Talos Threat Research Summit on Sunday. The conference by defenders, for defenders, returned this year after the inaugural event in 2018 to San Diego, where speakers passed on their...

Quarterly Report: Incident Response Trends in Q2 2022

Commodity malware usage surpasses ransomware by narrow margin By Caitlin Huey. For the first time in more than a year, ransomware was not the top threat Cisco Talos Incident Response CTIR responded to this quarter, as commodity malware surpassed ransomware by a narrow margin. This is likely due t...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple vulnerabilities in GOG Galaxy Games

Richard Johnson and Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Executive summary The GOG Galaxy video game launcher contains multiple vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious actor to carry out a variety of attacks. GOG Galaxy Games is a video game storefront that allows use...

Combing Through Brushaloader Amid Massive Detection Uptick

Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin authored this blog post with contributions from Matthew Molyett. Executive Summary Over the past several months, Cisco Talos has been monitoring various malware distribution campaigns leveraging the malware loader Brushaloader to deliver malware payloads to...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday - September 2018

Microsoft released its monthly set of security updates today for a variety of its products that address a variety of bugs. The latest Patch Tuesday covers 61 vulnerabilities, 17 of which are rated "critical," 43 that are rated "important" and one that is considered to have "moderate" severity. Th...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday - August 2017

Microsoft has released its monthly set of security advisories for vulnerabilities that have been identified and addressed in various products. This month's advisory release addresses 48 new vulnerabilities with 25 of them rated critical, 21 rated important, and 2 rated moderate. These...

Lazarus Group exploits ManageEngine vulnerability to deploy QuiteRAT

Cisco Talos discovered the North Korean state-sponsored actor Lazarus Group targeting internet backbone infrastructure and healthcare entities in Europe and the United States. This is the third documented campaign attributed to this actor in less than a year, with the actor reusing the same...

Threat Source newsletter (Aug. 22)

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. What’s old is new again. Our research this week centers around a series of long-lasting threat actors and malware that have been given n...

How Cisco Talos helped Howard County recover from a call center attack

On Aug. 11, 2018 the 911 non-emergency call center in Howard County, Maryland was in crisis — not for the types of calls flooding into dispatchers, but simply for the sheer numbers. The center, which usually receives 300 to 400 calls a day was now getting 2,500 in a 24-hour span of time. The...

Threat Source newsletter (May 9)

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. If you haven’t yet, there’s still time to register for this year’s Talos Threat Research Summit — our second annual conference by...