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...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple WIBU SYSTEMS WubiKey vulnerabilities

Marcin "Icewall" Noga of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Executive Summary Cisco Talos discovered two vulnerabilities that could allow remote code execution and memory disclosure at the kernel level in WIBU-SYSTEMS WibuKey. WibuKey is a USB key designed to protect software and...

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...

Vulnerability Spotlight: MySQL Multi-Master Manager Remote Command Injection Vulnerability

Discovered by Matthew Van Gundy of Asig Overview Today, Talos is releasing details of a new vulnerability within MySQL Multi-Master Manager. This is used to perform monitoring, failover and management of MySQL master-master replication configurations. By using MySQL MMM Multi-Master Replication...

Graftor - But I Never Asked for This…

This post is authored by Holger Unterbrink and Matthew MolyettOverviewFree software often downloaded from large freeware distribution sites is a boon for the internet, providing users with functionality that otherwise they would not be able to use. Often users, happy that they are getting somethi...

Open Document format creates twist in maldoc landscape

By Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres. Introduction Cisco Talos recently observed attackers changing the file formats they use in an attempt to thwart common antivirus engines. This can happen across other file formats, but today, we are showing a change of approach for an actor who has deemed...

Unravelling .NET with the Help of WinDBG

This blog was authored by Paul Rascagneres and Warren Mercer.Introduction.NET is an increasingly important component of the Microsoft ecosystem providing a shared framework for interoperability between different languages and hardware platforms. Many Microsoft tools, such as PowerShell, and other...

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...

Talos IR trends: BEC attacks surge, while weaknesses in MFA persist

Business email compromise BEC was the top threat observed by Cisco Talos Incident Response Talos IR in the first quarter of 2024, accounting for nearly half of engagements, which is more than double what was observed in the previous quarter. The most observed means of gaining initial access was t...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Accusoft ImageGear library code execution vulnerabilities

Emmanuel Tacheau of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Blog by Jon Munshaw. Cisco Talos recently discovered three code execution vulnerabilities in Accusoft ImageGear. The ImageGear library is a document-imaging developer toolkit to assist users with image conversion, creation, editing...

Vulnerability Spotlight: CVE-2018-3952 / CVE-2018-4010 - Multi-provider VPN Client Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities

Discovered by Paul Rascagneres. Overview Cisco Talos has discovered two similar vulnerabilities in the ProtonVPN and NordVPN VPN clients. The vulnerabilities allow attackers to execute code as an administrator on Microsoft Windows operating systems from a standard user. The vulnerabilities were...

Bisonal: 10 years of play

By Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura. Update 06/03/20: added samples from 2020. Executive summary Security researchers detected and exposed the Bisonal malware over the past 10 years. But the Tonto team, the threat actor behind it, didn't stop.The victimology didn't change over...

Beers with Talos EP 22: Forget the ASA, Rob Joyce Favorited Craig’s Tweet

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast Episode 22 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 EP22 Show Notes: Recorded 2/2/18 - Guests two EPs in a row! We are joined by Omar Santos from Cisco PSI...

Mercenary mayhem: A technical analysis of Intellexa's PREDATOR spyware

We would like to thank The Citizen Lab for their cooperation, support and inputs into this research. Commercial spyware use is on the rise, with actors leveraging these sophisticated tools to conduct surveillance operations against a growing number of targets. Cisco Talos has new details of a...

Threat Source newsletter (July 18, 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. A group we’re calling “SWEED” may be behind years of Agent Tesla attacks. This week, we uncovered everything we know about this...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday — March 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 64 vulnerabilities, 17 of which are rated “critical,” 45 that are considered “important” and one “moderate” and “low” vulnerability each. This...

Breaking things to keep them safe with Philippe Laulheret

In the latest Humans of Talos, Amy sits down with Senior Vulnerability Researcher Philippe Laulheret to demystify the world of ethical hacking. Philippe shares his unique journey from French engineering school to the front lines of cybersecurity, explaining how his lifelong love for solving puzzl...

Largest Patch Tuesday since July includes two exploited in the wild, three critical vulnerabilities

The largest Microsoft Patch Tuesday since July includes two vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild and three other critical issues across the company's range of hardware and software offerings. October's monthly security update from Microsoft includes fixes for 117 CVEs, the most in...

Lazarus Group's infrastructure reuse leads to discovery of new malware

In the Lazarus Groups latest campaign, which we detailed in a recent blog, the North Korean state-sponsored actor is exploiting CVE-2022-47966, a ManageEngine ServiceDesk vulnerability to deploy multiple threats. In addition to their "QuiteRAT" malware, which we covered in the blog, we also...

Uncovering weaknesses in Apple macOS and VMWare vCenter: 12 vulnerabilities in RPC implementation

Cisco Talos discovered 12 memory corruption vulnerabilities in MSRPC implementations on Apple macOS and VMWare vCenter. - Seven vulnerabilities affect Apple macOS only. - Two vulnerabilities affect VMWare vCenter. - Three vulnerabilities affect both. For more on these individual vulnerabilities,...

Microsoft discloses more than 130 vulnerabilities as part of July’s Patch Tuesday, four exploited in the wild

Microsoft released its monthly security update Tuesday, disclosing the most vulnerabilities as part of Patch Tuesday in more than a year. The company released details of more than 130 vulnerabilities, the most in a month since April 2022, 10 of which are considered to be critical. The remaining...

Microsoft Netlogon exploitation continues to rise

Cisco Talos is tracking a spike in exploitation attempts against the Microsoft vulnerability CVE-2020-1472, an elevation of privilege bug in Netlogon, outlined in the August Microsoft Patch Tuesday report. The vulnerability stems from a flaw in a cryptographic authentication scheme used by the...

Threat Source newsletter (May 23)

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. Election security is a touchy — and oftentimes depressing — topic of conversation. So why not let Beer with Talos bring some levity...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Remote code execution bug in SQLite

Cory Duplantis of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Executive summary SQLite contains an exploitable use-after-free vulnerability that could allow an attacker to gain the ability to remotely execute code on the victim machine. SQLite is a client-sidedatabase management system contained i...

Persian Stalker pillages Iranian users of Instagram and Telegram

This blog post is authored by Danny Adamatis, Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres, Vitor Ventura and with the contributions of Eric Kuhla. Introduction State-sponsored actors have a number of different techniques at their disposal to remotely gain access to social media and secure messaging...

Microsoft Tuesday August 2018

Microsoft released its monthly set of security advisories today for vulnerabilities that have been identified and addressed in various products. This month's advisory release addresses 62 new vulnerabilities, 20 of which are rated “critical,” 38 that are rated “important,” one that is rated...

Threat Roundup for January 10 to January 17

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

Threat Advisory: SolarWinds supply chain attack

Update 12/21: IOC section updated to include new information and associated stage. Update 12/18: We have been able to verify the name server for the DGA domain was updated as far back as late February. Compromised binaries appear to have been available on the SolarWinds website until very recentl...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Vulnerabilities in Yi Technology Home Camera

Vulnerabilities Discovered by Lilith xx of Cisco Talos. Overview Cisco Talos is disclosing multiple vulnerabilities in the firmware of the Yi Technology Home Camera. In order to prevent the exploitation of these vulnerabilities, Talos worked with Yi Technology to make sure a newer version of the...

WinDBG and JavaScript Analysis

This blog was authored by Paul Rascagneres.IntroductionJavaScript is frequently used by malware authors to execute malicious code on Windows systems because it is powerful, natively available and rarely disabled. Our previous article on .NET analysis generated much interest relating to how to use...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for September 2022 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

By Jon Munshaw and Asheer Malhotra. Microsoft released its monthly security update Tuesday, disclosing 64 vulnerabilities across the company’s hardware and software line, a sharp decline from the record number of issues Microsoft disclosed last month. September's security update features five...

What you can learn from Cisco Talos’ new oil pumpjack workshop

Paul Rascagneres wrote this blog post with contributions from Patrick DeSantis from Cisco Talos ARES Advanced Research/Embedded Systems. Executive summary Every day, more industrial control systems ICS become vulnerable to cyber attacks. As these massive, critical machines become more...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Python.org certificate parsing denial-of-service

Colin Read and Nicolas Edet of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Executive summary Python.org contains an exploitable denial-of-service vulnerability in its X509 certificate parser. A specially crafted X509 certificate can cause a NULL pointer dereference, resulting in a denial of...

Talos discovers Microsoft kernel mode driver vulnerabilities that could lead to SYSTEM privileges; Seven other critical issues disclosed

Microsoft disclosed six security vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited across its products as part of the companys regular Patch Tuesday security update. In all, Augusts monthly round of patches from Microsoft included 87 vulnerabilities, seven of which are considered critical. In...

Threat Source newsletter (Nov. 7, 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. The only news we’re going to cover this week is the biggest news we’ve had in a while. Tuesday, we announced that Cisco Incident Respons...

Anatomy of a sextortion scam

This blog was written by Jaeson Schultz. Since this July, attackers are increasingly spreading sextortion-type attacks across the internet. Cisco Talos has been investigating these campaigns over the past few months. In many cases the spammers harvested email addresses and passwords from a public...

Cisco ASA DoS bug attacked in wild

By Nick Biasini. Cisco Talos has recently noticed a sudden spike in exploitation attempts against a specific vulnerability in our Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance ASA and Firepower Appliance. The vulnerability, CVE-2018-0296, is a denial-of-service and information disclosure directory traversal...

Sea Turtle keeps on swimming, finds new victims, DNS hijacking techniques

By Danny Adamitis with contributions from Paul Rascagneres. Executive summary After several months of activity, the actors behind the "Sea Turtle" DNS hijacking campaign are not slowing down. Cisco Talos recently discovered new details that suggest they regrouped after we published our initial...

Threat Roundup for May 17 to May 24

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

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Vulnerabilities in CorelDRAW X8

Today, Talos is disclosing several vulnerabilities that have been identified in CorelDRAW X8. CorelDRAW X8 is graphics suite used for manipulating raster and vector images and is a common alternative to Adobe Creative Cloud. Several of the vulnerabilities being disclosed today specifically affect...

Threat Roundup for July 16 to July 23

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between July 16 and July 23. 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 — Sept. 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 covers 85 vulnerabilities, 19 of which are rated “critical," 65 that are considered "important" and one "moderate." There is also a...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Two vulnerabilities in Epignosis eFront

Yuri Kramarz of Security Advisory Incident Response EMEAR discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos discovered two vulnerabilities in Epignosis eFront — one of which could allow an attacker to remotely execute code on the victim system, and another that opens the victim machine to SQL...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for September 2023 — Unusually low 5 critical vulnerabilities included in Microsoft Patch Tuesday, along with two zero-days

Microsoft disclosed 65 vulnerabilities across its suite of products and software Tuesday, only five of which are considered critical, which is very low compared to Microsofts usual security updates. However, there are two issues disclosed and patched this month that have already been exploited in...

Threat Roundup for April 19 to April 26

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

Threat Roundup for July 23 to July 30

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between July 23 and July 30. 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...

Dissecting a complex vulnerability and achieving arbitrary code execution in Ichitaro Word

Cisco Talos disclosed several vulnerabilities in JustSystems Ichitaro Word Processor last year. These vulnerabilities were complex and were discovered through extensive reverse engineering. CVE-2023-35126 and its peers CVE-2023-34366, CVE-2023-38127, and CVE-2023-38128 were each assessed as...

Microsoft patches 12 critical vulnerabilities, nine of which are in Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol

Microsoft disclosed 104 vulnerabilities in its extensive range of software and services, the most in a single Patch Tuesday since July. What is most notable is that this batch of vulnerabilities includes 12 that are considered "critical," nine of which are remote code execution vulnerabilities in...

Threat Roundup for March 8 to March 15

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between March 08 and March 15. 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 Vulnerability Deep Dive - TALOS-2018-0636 / CVE-2018-3971 Sophos HitmanPro.Alert vulnerability

Marcin Noga of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Introduction Sophos patched two vulnerabilities in Sophos HitmanPro.Alert in version 3.7.9.759. We publicly disclosed these issues last week here, Cisco Talos will show you the process of developing an exploit for one of these bugs. We wil...