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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Natus NeuroWorks Multiple Vulnerabilites

Vulnerabilities discovered by Cory Duplantis from Talos Overview In April 2018, Talos published 5 vulnerabilities in Natus NeuroWorks software. We have also identified 3 additional vulnerabilities. This software is used in the Natus Xltek EEG medical products from Natus Medical Inc. The vulnerabl...

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 (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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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 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 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: 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...

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...

Ransomware or Wiper? LockerGoga Straddles the Line

Executive Summary Ransomware attacks have been in the news with increased frequency over the past few years. This type of malware can be extremely disruptive and even cause operational impacts in critical systems that may be infected. LockerGoga is yet another example of this sort of malware. It ...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Walt Disney Per-Face Texture Mapping faceInfoSize Code Execution Vulnerability

This vulnerability was discovered by Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos. Executive Summary Walt Disney PTEX is an open source software application maintained by Walt Disney Animation Studios. It is designed for use in post-production rendering. It allows for the storage of thousands of texture mappings...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Ruby Rails Gem XSS Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities discovered by Zachary Sanchez of Cisco ASIG Overview Talos has discovered two XSS vulnerabilities in Ruby Rails Gems. Rails is a Ruby framework designed to create web services or web pages. Ruby Gems is a package manager for distributing software packages as 'gems'. The two XSS...

C2 With It All: From Ransomware To Carding

By Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura. Summary Cisco Talos recently discovered a new server hosting a large stockpile of malicious files. Our analysis of these files shows that these attackers were able to obtain a deep level of access to victims' infrastructure — all of which...

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...

Know before you go: Talos Threat Research Summit

We are now just 48 hours away from the second annual Talos Threat Research Summit. After last year's success in Orlando, we are back and better than ever from San Diego on Sunday. If you plan on attending, here's what you need to know before Sunday morning. Can't make it out? You can still stream...

Sorpresa! JasperLoader targets Italy with a new bag of tricks

Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin authored this blog post. Executive summary Over the past few months, a new malware loader called JasperLoader has emerged that targets Italy and other European countries with banking trojans such as Gootkit. We recently released a comprehensive analysis of the...

Threat Roundup for Feb. 1 to Feb. 8

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Feb. 01 and Feb. 08. 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 remote code execution bugs in NitroPDF

Cory Duplantis and Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered multiple remote code execution vulnerabilities in NitroPDF. Nitro PDF allows users to save, read, sign and edit PDF files on their machines. There are two versions of the product...

Recent MuddyWater-associated BlackWater campaign shows signs of new anti-detection techniques

This blog was authored by Danny Adamitis, David Maynor, and Kendall McKay Executive summary Cisco Talos assesses with moderate confidence that a campaign we recently discovered called "BlackWater" is associated with suspected persistent threat actor MuddyWater. Newly associated samples from April...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday - February 2018

Microsoft Patch Tuesday - February 2018 Today 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 54 new vulnerabilities with 14 of them rated critical, 38 of them...

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...

New campaign uses government, union-themed lures to deliver Cobalt Strike beacons

By Chetan Raghuprasad and Vanja Svajcer. Cisco Talos discovered a malicious campaign in August 2022 delivering Cobalt Strike beacons that could be used in later, follow-on attacks. Lure themes in the phishing documents in this campaign are related to the job details of a government organization i...

New 4CAN tool helps identify vulnerabilities in on-board car computers

By Alex DeTrano, Jason Royes, and Matthew Valites. Executive summary Modern automobiles contain hundreds of sensors and mechanics that communicate via computers to understand their surrounding environment. Those components provide real-time information to drivers, connect the vehicle to a global...

Cyber Security Week in Review (Feb. 8)

Welcome to this week's Cyber Security Week in Review, where Cisco Talos runs down all of the news we think you need to know in the security world. For more news delivered to your inbox every week, sign up for our Threat Source newsletter here. Top headlines this week Attackers continue to utilize...

Attack on Critical Infrastructure Leverages Template Injection

Contributors: Sean Baird, Earl Carter, Erick Galinkin, Christopher Marczewski & Joe Marshall Executive SummaryAttackers are continually trying to find new ways to target users with malware sent via email. Talos has identified an email-based attack targeting the energy sector, including nuclear...

Malvertising: Online advertising's darker side

By Nick Biasini, Chris Neal and Matt Valites. Executive summary One of the trickiest challenges enterprises face is managing the balance between aggressively blocking malicious advertisements aka malvertising and allowing content to remain online, accessible for the average user. The days of...