Great Scott, I’m tired

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. "Back to the Future" is 40 years old this year, and at the risk of giving away sensitive information to an audience of hackers… so am I. I don't really know what 40 is supposed to feel like. Honestly, I don't feel all that different...

ReVault! When your SoC turns against you… deep dive edition

For a high-level overview of this research, you can refer to our Vulnerability Spotlight. This is the in-depth version that shares many more technical details. In this post, we'll be covering the entire research process as well as providing technical explanations of the exploits behind the attack...

Unraveling the U.S. toll road smishing scams

Cisco Talos has observed a widespread and ongoing financial theft SMS phishing smishing campaign since October 2024 that targets toll road users in the United States of America. We observed that the campaign targets people across several states in the U.S. according to the domain names used in th...

Beers with Talos: Year in Review episode

Joe, Hazel, Bill and Dave break down Talos' Year in Review 2024 and discuss how and why cybercriminals have been leaning so heavily on attacks that are routed in stealth in simplicity. The team also provide insights into some of the topics of the report, including the top-targeted vulnerabilities...

Everything is connected to security

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Hello friends! Joe here again! I have just returned from the frozen northern tundra of Fargo, North Dakota. This was my first real visit to the frigid climates of the Midwest, and I have to say, they take cold to a new level. I was...

A puppet made me cry and all I got was this t-shirt

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Anyone who spoke with me in the last several weeks has had to deal with me loudly waiting in anticipation for the long-awaited "Project Hail Mary" movie adaptation. I read and cried over the book by Andy Weir, who's also the author o...

Backdoors & Breaches: How Talos is helping humanitarian aid NGOs prepare for cyber attacks

In 2023, Talos collaborated with NetHope and Cisco Crisis Response to create a customized Backdoors & Breaches expansion deck for international humanitarian organizations, addressing their unique cybersecurity challenges. The new expansion deck helps NGOs with constrained budgets improve proactiv...

A message from Bruce the mechanical shark

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Hi, I'm Bruce, the 25-foot mechanical star of "Jaws." This summer marks 50 years since my 4 minutes of screentime kept people out of the water for decades. Maybe this Fourth of July weekend you're planning to sea-shanty your way to a...

Talos Takes: 2025 insights from Talos and Splunk

In this episode of Talos Takes, Amy is joined by William Largent Cisco Talos and Lou Stella Splunk for a "double-header" discussion. With the recent release of the Cisco Talos 2025 Year in Review and the Splunk Top 50 Cybersecurity Threats report, we're breaking down the most critical trends that...

AI wrote my code and all I got was this broken prototype

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Vulnerabilities within software are a persistent challenge. Software engineers inadvertently tend to make the same mistakes repeatedly, with the same entries appearing in the annual top 25 list of Common Weakness Enumerations each...

Choose your fighter: Balancing competing requirements to select models for your AI SOC

Selecting a model for your security operations center SOC and digital forensics and incident response DFIR tasks is important, but selecting the best one is more involved than you might think. SOC tasks rely on a combination of model efficacy, analysis time, cost, and consistency of results. Cisc...