DICOM, Pydicom, GDCM, and Orthanc: A technical tour of what really happens in the heap

Over the last decade, DICOM parsing has become an active research topic. The reason is simple: DICOM is both critical and complicated. Hospitals rely on DICOM-based PACS systems, and those systems often automatically ingest files received over the network. That means malformed data could directly...

What to know about the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS attacks

Cisco Talos is actively tracking the novel distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks cloud services provider Cloudflare disclosed earlier this week. The techniques described in Cloudflares blog post resulted in a record-breaking DDoS attack and could facilitate much larger attacks in the future...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Vulnerabilities in IBM AIX could lead to command injection with elevated privileges

Tim Brown of Cisco Security Advisory EMEA discovered these vulnerabilities and contributed to this blog post. A Cisco security researcher recently discovered two vulnerabilities in the IBM AIX Unix platforms that could be exploited to inject commands and logs into targeted systems with elevated...

Threat Source newsletter (July 29, 2021)

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw.Good afternoon, Talos readers. Thanks to everyone who joined us live yesterday for our talk on business email compromise. If you missed us live, the recording is up on our YouTube page now. Nick Biasini from Talos Outreach provided some great advice on... This i...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Remote code execution vulnerability in Apple Safari

Marcin Towalski of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw. The Apple Safari web browser contains a remote code execution vulnerability in its Fonts feature. If a user were to open a malicious web page in Safari, they could trigger a type confusion, resulting in memory...

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

By Jon Munshaw. Microsoft released its monthly security update today, disclosing vulnerabilities across many of its products and releasing corresponding updates. This month's Patch Tuesday covers 25 vulnerabilities, two of which are considered critical. This month’s security update covers securit...

Threat Roundup for March 22 to March 29

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between March 22 and March 29. 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...

More helpful resources for users of all skill levels to help you Take a Security Action

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I continue to be saddened by all the conflict in Israel and Gaza thats still ongoing. Ill be back with a "normal" newsletter next week, as unfortunately, there doesnt seem to be a peaceful solution coming any time soon. In the meantim...

10 zero-day vulnerabilities in industrial cell router could lead to code execution, buffer overflows

Cisco Talos recently disclosed 11 vulnerabilities, 10 of which are zero-days without a patch in an industrial cellular router. Attackers could exploit these vulnerabilities in the Yifan YF325 to carry out a variety of attacks, in some cases gaining the ability to execute arbitrary shell commands ...

Threat Roundup for March 20 to March 27

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between March 20 and March 27. 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 Source newsletter (May 16)

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. We were packed with vulnerabilities this week. For starters, there’s Microsoft Patch Tuesday, which we’ll cover farther down. We al...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple Vulnerabilities in Moxa EDR-810 Industrial Secure Router

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Carlos Pacho of Cisco Talos Today, Talos is disclosing several vulnerabilities that have been identified in Moxa EDR-810 industrial secure router. Moxa EDR-810 is an industrial secure router with firewall/NAT/VPN and managed Layer 2 switch functions. It is...

Threat Round Up for Aug 25 - Sep 1

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between August 25 and September 1. 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...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Lexmark Perceptive Document Filters Code Execution Bugs

OverviewTalos is disclosing a pair of code execution vulnerabilities in Lexmark Perceptive Document Filters. Perceptive Document Filters are a series of libraries that are used to parse massive amounts of different types of file formats for multiple purposes. Talos has previously discussed in...

UAT-7810 continues building ORB networks using new malware

Cisco Talos is actively tracking infrastructure and malware associated with UAT-7810, an advanced persistent threat APT actor responsible for maintaining and proliferating the LapDogs Operational Relay Box ORB network, first disclosed by SecurityScorecard in 2025. UAT-7810 is most likely tasked...

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...

10 new vulnerabilities disclosed by Talos, including use-after-free issue in Google Chrome

Cisco Talos disclosed 10 vulnerabilities over the past two weeks affecting a range of software, including the popular Google Chrome web browser. Attackers could exploit these vulnerabilities to carry out a variety of attacks, in some cases gaining the ability to execute remote code on the targete...

Threat Source newsletter (April 27, 2023) — New Cisco Secure offerings and extra security from Duo

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Im writing this earlier in the week as I get ready for some personal travel everyone is lucky I passed on writing another Cybersecurity Mock Draft, so apologies if I miss anything major that happens at RSA. But Cisco beat everyone to...

Vulnerability Spotlight: OS command injection, directory traversal and other vulnerabilities found in Siretta Quartz-Gold and FreshTomato

Francesco Benvenuto of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered several vulnerabilities in the Siretta Quartz-Gold router. Talos also discovered vulnerabilities in FreshTomato while investigating the Siretta router. The Siretta Quartz-Gold is an industrial...

Threat Source newsletter for April 23, 2020

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. There’s a new Beers with Talos podcast out now. And guess what? They actually talk about security this time! The guys are looking for...

Threat Source newsletter (Nov. 14, 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. It was all about the bugs this week. Patch Tuesday was especially busy for us, including our usual recap of all the vulnerabilities...

Beers with Talos Ep. #61: Hacking for good is a bad idea

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast episode No. 61 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: If iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing, click here. Recorded Aug. 30, 2019: In this extra-sized episode, we cover a lot, starting with Retadup, and discussing the intricate...

One year later: The VPNFilter catastrophe that wasn't

Cisco Talos first disclosed the existence of VPNFilter on May 23, 2018. The malware made headlines across the globe, as it was a sophisticated piece of malware developed by a nation state, infecting half a million devices, and poised to cause havoc. Yet the attack was averted. The attacker’s...

Threat Round-up for July 14 - July 21

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between July 14 and July 21. 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 characteristics,...

What NIST’s latest password standards mean, and why the old ones weren’t working

Say goodbye to the days of using the "@" symbol to mean "a" in your password or replacing an "S" with a "$." The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST recently announced new guidelines for the ways website and organizations should handle password creation and management that wi...

Changes to Cisco Talos’ Content and Threat Category lists

Cisco Talos is happy to announce the upcoming changes to our Content and Threat Category lists. Our goal is to provide you with sufficient intelligence details to allow you to make informed decisions to protect your network without disrupting your organization’s productivity. These changes will...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Denial-of-service in VMWare Fusion 11

Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Executive summary VMware Fusion 11 contains an exploitable denial-of-service vulnerability. VMWare Fusion is an application for Mac operating systems that allows users to run other OSs in a virtual environment, such as Windows and Linux. A...

Threat Source newsletter (Oct. 10, 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. It’s that time again to update all your Microsoft products. The company released its monthly update Tuesday, disclosing more than 60...

Threat Roundup for June 2 to June 9

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats weve observed between June 2 and June 9. As with previous roundups, this post isnt meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats weve observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics,...

Threat Source newsletter (March 9, 2023) — Stop freaking out about ChatGPT

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. There is no shortage of hyperbolic headlines about ChatGPT out there, everything from how it and other AI tools like it are here to replace all our jobs, make college essays a thing of the past and change the face of cybersecurity as ...

Manjusaka: A Chinese sibling of Sliver and Cobalt Strike

By Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura. Cisco Talos recently discovered a new attack framework called "Manjusaka" being used in the wild that has the potential to become prevalent across the threat landscape. This framework is advertised as an imitation of the Cobalt Strike framework. The implants...

CISO Advisory: Security Architecture

Security architecture and design is a vital function of a healthy enterprise. This function is fundamentally, about understanding IT architecture relationships, and ensuring security is a vital element of its implementation. This is the second paper within the series of CISO Advisories, in this...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Investintech Able2Extract

Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos discovered this vulnerability. Blog by Jon Munshaw. Cisco Talos recently discovered two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Investintech’s Able2Extract Professional. This software is a cross-platform PDF tool for Windows, Mac and Linux that converts PDFs and allows...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Multiple vulnerabilities in Aspose PDF API

Marcin Noga of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered multiple remote code execution vulnerabilities in the Aspose.PDF API. Aspose provides a series of APIs for manipulating or converting a large family of document formats. These vulnerabilities exist in API...

Cyber Security Week in Review (March 1)

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 Drupal patched a “highly...

Threat Round Up for Feb 9 - Feb 16

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between February 9 and February 16. 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...

April’s Patch Tuesday includes 150 vulnerabilities, 60 which could lead to remote code execution

In one of the largest Patch Tuesdays in years, Microsoft disclosed 150 vulnerabilities across its software and product portfolio this week, including more than 60 that could lead to remote code execution. Though Aprils monthly security update from Microsoft is the largest since at least the start...

Operation Blacksmith: Lazarus targets organizations worldwide using novel Telegram-based malware written in DLang

Cisco Talos recently discovered a new campaign conducted by the Lazarus Group were calling "Operation Blacksmith," employing at least three new DLang-based malware families, two of which are remote access trojans RATs, where one of these uses Telegram bots and channels as a medium of command and...

Threat Source newsletter (Feb. 16, 2023) — Recapping what we may have missed so far this year

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I am back after more than three months away from Talos on parental leave. Having a baby really resets your expectations for "keeping up" with the world. From November through mid-January or so I had no idea what was going on with the...

Lazarus and the tale of three RATs

By Jung soo An, Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura. Cisco Talos has been tracking a new campaign operated by the Lazarus APT group, attributed to North Korea by the United States government. This campaign involved the exploitation of vulnerabilities in VMWare Horizon to gain an initial foothold in...

Threat Roundup for February 21 to February 28

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Feb. 21 and Feb. 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...

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...

The commoditization of mobile espionage software

By Matthew Valites with contributions by Joanne Kim and Edmund Brumaghin. Executive summary Mobile stalkerware has all sorts of wide-ranging consequences. The creators of these types of apps can track user's locations, see their social media usage and more. And they certainly open the door for...

Vulnerability in the Intel Unified Shader compiler for the Intel Graphics Accelerator

Vulnerabilities discovered by Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos Talos is disclosing a pointer corruption vulnerability in the Intel Unified Shader compiler for the Intel Graphics Accelerator. Overview In order for the graphics to be produced, the graphics accelerators need to process the OpenGL scripts...

Vulnerability Spotlight: TALOS-2018-0529-531 - Multiple Vulnerabilities in NASA CFITSIO library

Vulnerabilities discovered by Tyler Bohan from Talos Overview Talos is disclosing three remote code execution vulnerabilities in the NASA CFITSIO library. CFITSIO is a library of C and Fortran subroutines for reading and writing data files in the Flexible Image Transport System FITS data format...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Apache OpenOffice Vulnerabilities

Discovered by Marcin ‘Icewall’ Noga of Cisco TalosOverviewToday, Talos is releasing details of three new vulnerabilities discovered within Apache OpenOffice application. The first vulnerability, TALOS-2017-0295 within OpenOffice Writer, the second TALOS-2017-0300 in the Draw application, and the...

Threat Spotlight: Follow the Bad Rabbit

Note: This blog post discusses active research by Talos into a new threat. This information should be considered preliminary and will be updated as research continues.Update 2017-10-26 16:10 EDT: added additional information regarding the links between Nyetya and BadRabbitUpdate 2017-10-26 09:20...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Specially crafted files could lead to denial of service, information disclosure in OpenImageIO parser

Lilith of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered three vulnerabilities in the OpenImageIO image-parsing library that many popular pieces of 3-D rendering software use. OpenImageIO is a library that converts, compares and processes various image files. Blende...

Vulnerability Spotlight: Asus router access, information disclosure, denial of service vulnerabilities discovered

Lilith of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Cisco Talos recently discovered three vulnerabilities in Asus router software. The Asus RT-AX82U router is one of the newer Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax-enabled routers that also supports mesh networking with other Asus routers. Like other routers, it i...

Threat Round up for December 9 to December 16

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats weve observed between Dec. 9 and Dec. 16. As with previous roundups, this post isnt meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats weve observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics,...