AI-powered honeypots: Turning the tables on malicious AI agents

Generative AI allows defenders to instantly create diverse honeypots, like Linux shells or Internet of Things IoT devices, using simple text prompts. This makes deploying complex, convincing deceptive environments much easier and more scalable than traditional methods. AI-driven attacks often...

Five defender priorities from the Talos Year in Review

A familiar theme in security right now is that the barrier to entry for attackers is at an all-time low. AI tools can spin up websites within minutes that can easily direct data to disposable external data stores and send alerts for new captures -- all without code. One such case was recently...

It pays to be a forever student

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. If I haven't said it in a newsletter before, I'll say it now: If you want to be good at cybersecurity, be a forever student. Cultivating and feeding your desire to know how things work is one of the key ingredients to being a hacker...

UAT-4356's Targeting of Cisco Firepower Devices

Cisco Talos is aware of UAT-4356's continued active targeting of Cisco Firepower devices' Firepower eXtensible Operating System FXOS. UAT-4356 exploited n-day vulnerabilities CVE-2025-20333 and CVE-2025-20362 to gain unauthorized access to vulnerable devices, where the threat actor deployed their...

IR Trends Q1 2026: Phishing reemerges as top initial access vector, as attacks targeting public administration persist

Phishing reemerged as the most observed means of gaining initial access, accounting for over a third of the engagements where initial access could be determined. Phishing has not been the top vector for initial access since Q2 2025. Public administration and health care tied as the most targeted...

[Podcast] It's not you, it's your printer: State-sponsored and phishing threats in 2025

!\Podcast\ It's not you, it's your printer: State-sponsored and phishing threats in 2025https://storage.ghost.io/c/af/a0/afa04ee3-414f-4481-8d23-7e7c146f192e/content/images/2026/04/YiR2025cover2x1-2-1.jpg In this episode, we unpack state-sponsored and phishing trends from the 2025 Talos Year in...

Phishing and MFA exploitation: Targeting the keys to the kingdom

In 2025, attackers increasingly targeted weaknesses in multi-factor authentication MFA workflows, and phishing attacks leveraged valid, compromised credentials to launch lures from trusted accounts. The trends focused entirely on trust, or the lack thereof, in everyday business operations. Phishi...

Bad Apples: Weaponizing native macOS primitives for movement and execution

As macOS adoption grows among developers and DevOps, it has become a high value target; however, native "living-off-the-land" LOTL techniques for the platform remain significantly under-documented compared to Windows. Adversaries can bypass security controls by repurposing native features like...

Foxit, LibRaw vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed one Foxit Reader vulnerability, and six LibRaw file reader vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, all in adherence to Cisco 's third-party vulnerability...

The Q1 vulnerability pulse

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. The first quarter of 2026 passed faster than a misconfigured firewall rule gets exploited -- and the last few weeks have been firmly stamped with the "software supply chain compromise" label, with headlines surrounding incidents...

PowMix botnet targets Czech workforce

Cisco Talos discovered an ongoing malicious campaign, operating since at least December 2025, affecting a broader workforce in the Czech Republic with a previously undocumented botnet we call "PowMix." PowMix employs randomized command-and-control C2 beaconing intervals, rather than persistent...

More than pretty pictures: Wendy Bishop on visual storytelling in tech

In this episode of Humans of Talos, Amy sits down with Wendy Bishop, Head of Creative, to explore the vital role of design in the world of cybersecurity. From her early beginnings in web design and journalism to leading the creative vision for Talos, Wendy shares the unique challenges and rewards...

The n8n n8mare: How threat actors are misusing AI workflow automation

Cisco Talos research has uncovered agentic AI workflow automation platform abuse in emails. Recently, we identified an increase in the number of emails that abuse n8n, one of these platforms, from as early as October 2025 through March 2026. In this blog, Talos provides concrete examples of how...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2026 - Snort Rule and Prominent Vulnerabilities

Microsoft has released its monthly security update for April 2026, which includes 165 vulnerabilities affecting a wide range of products, including eight Microsoft marked as "critical." CVE-2026-23666 is a critical Denial of Service DoS vulnerability that affects the .NET framework. Successful...

State-sponsored threats: Different objectives, similar access paths

Across the Talos 2025 Year in Review, state-sponsored threat activity from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all had varying motivations, such as espionage, disruption, financial gain, and geopolitical influence. But when you look at how these operations actually unfold, similar tactics,...

[Video] The TTP Ep. 22: The Collapse of the Patch Window

!\Video\ The TTP Ep. 22: The Collapse of the Patch Windowhttps://storage.ghost.io/c/af/a0/afa04ee3-414f-4481-8d23-7e7c146f192e/content/images/2026/04/YiR2025cover2x1-3.jpg One of the clearest trends in the 2025 Talos Year in Review is just how quickly vulnerabilities are now being turned into...

The threat hunter’s gambit

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible." ― Richard Feynman " I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to wan...

From the field to the report and back again: How incident responders can use the Year in Review

Every year, Cisco Talos publishes Year in Review, a comprehensive look at the previous year's threat landscape. It's drawn from an enormous volume of telemetry, such as endpoint detections, network traffic, email data, and boots-on-the-ground Cisco Talos Incident Response Talos IR engagements. As...

New Lua-based malware “LucidRook” observed in targeted attacks against Taiwanese organizations

Cisco Talos uncovered a cluster of activity we track as UAT-10362 conducting spear-phishing campaigns against Taiwanese non-governmental organizations NGOs and suspected universities to deliver a newly identified malware family, "LucidRook." LucidRook is a sophisticated stager that embeds a Lua...

Talos Takes: 2025's ransomware trends and zombie vulnerabilities

Join Amy and Pierre Cadieux as they unpack the ransomware and vulnerability trends that defined 2025. From the persistent ransomware threats targeting the manufacturing sector to the rise of stealthy living-off-the-land tactics, we break down what these shifts mean for your defense strategy. Why...

The Trojan horse of cybercrime: Weaponizing SaaS notification pipelines

By Diana Brown Cisco Talos has recently observed an increase in activity that is leveraging notification pipelines in popular collaboration platforms to deliver spam and phishing emails. These emails are transmitted using the legitimate mail delivery infrastructure associated with GitHub and Jira...

Year in Review: Vulnerabilities old and new and something React2

Speed and age shouldn't be allowed to pair up, but that is the theme of the Talos 2025 Year in Review vulnerability findings. Figure 1. React/React2Shell 2025 at the top, with PHPUnit 2017 and Log4j 2021 following up. The year was characterized by an unending beat-down on infrastructure that reli...

Do not get high(jacked) off your own supply (chain)

In the span of just a few weeks, we have observed a dizzying array of major supply chain attacks. Prominent examples include the malicious modification of Axios, a popular HTTP client library for JavaScript, as well as cascading compromises from TeamPCP, a "chaos-as-a-service" group that injected...

Axios NPM supply chain incident

Cisco Talos is actively investigating the March 31, 2026 supply chain attack on the official Axios node package manager npm package during which two malicious versions v1.14.1 and v0.30.4 were deployed. Axios is one of the more popular JavaScript libraries with as many as 100 million downloads pe...

The democratisation of business email compromise fraud

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Last weekend, I witnessed a crime. Not a notable crime that you might read about in the press, but an unremarkable fraud attempt that nevertheless illustrates how new threat actor capabilities are emerging. I imagine that most people...

[Video] The TTP Ep 21: When Attackers Become Trusted Users

!\Video\ The TTP Ep 21: When Attackers Become Trusted Usershttps://storage.ghost.io/c/af/a0/afa04ee3-414f-4481-8d23-7e7c146f192e/content/images/2026/04/YiR2025cover2x1.jpg In this episode of the Talos Threat Perspective, we explore how identity is being used to gain, extend, and maintain access...

UAT-10608: Inside a large-scale automated credential harvesting operation targeting web applications

Cisco Talos is disclosing a large-scale automated credential harvesting campaign carried out by a threat cluster we are tracking as "UAT-10608." Post-compromise, UAT-10608 leverages automated scripts for extracting and exfiltrating credentials from a variety of applications, that are then posted ...

Qilin EDR killer infection chain

Endpoint detection and response EDR tools are widely deployed and far more capable than traditional antivirus. As a result, attackers use EDR killers to disable or bypass them. Disabling telemetry collection process, memory, network activity limits what defenders can see and analyze. As defenders...

Inside the Talos 2025 Year in Review: A discussion on what the data means for defenders

Every year, the Cisco Talos Year in Review captures the patterns shaping the threat landscape. The 2025 report paints a clear picture: Attackers are moving faster than ever, while using identity-related attacks as the primary battleground. To unpack the biggest takeaways and what they mean for...

An overview of ransomware threats in Japan in 2025 and early detection insights from Qilin cases

In 2025, a total of 134 ransomware incidents were reported in Japan, marking a 17.5% increase compared to 2024. Among these, 22 incidents were attributed to Qilin, representing 16.4% of the total. In 2025, Qilin ransomware was highly active. Looking ahead to 2026, unless there is significant...

Ransomware in 2025: Blending in is the strategy

Ransomware attacks aren't smash-and-grab anymore. They're built on access that already looks legitimate -- closer to positioning chess pieces than breaking the door down. That's the big trend that comes through in the ransomware data from the Talos 2025 Year in Review. Once attackers have initial...

TP-Link, Canva, HikVision vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed a vulnerability in HikVision, as well as 10 in TP-Link, and 19 in Canva. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, all in adherence to Cisco 's third-party vulnerability...

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...

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...

Beers with Talos breaks down the 2025 Talos Year in Review

The Beers with Talos B team that's Hazel, Bill, Joe and Dave break down sometimes in the literal sense the 2025 Talos Year in Review which is available now. The team dives into the biggest cybersecurity trends of the year, including: The rapid weaponization of new vulnerabilities Why identity abu...

2025 Talos Year in Review: Speed, scale, and staying power

The 2025 Talos Year in Review is now available to view online. The pace and scale of adversary activity in 2025 placed sustained pressure on security teams across industries. As with each annual report, our goal at Talos is to provide the security community with a clear analysis of the tactics,...

You have to invite them in

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I found myself watching the Oscars ceremony in its entirety for the first time in a few years. I'm in the U.K., so I watched it the following day. With next week's Year in Review launch looming and several pieces of content still to...

Everyday tools, extraordinary crimes: the ransomware exfiltration playbook

Data exfiltration activity increasingly leverages legitimate native utilities, commonly deployed third-party tools, and cloud service clients, reducing the effectiveness of static indicators of compromise IOCs and tool-based blocking strategies. The Exfiltration Framework systematically normalize...

Transparent COM instrumentation for malware analysis

COM automation is a core Windows technology that allows code to access external functionality through well-defined interfaces. It is similar to traditionally loading a DLL, but is class-based rather than function-based. Many advanced Windows capabilities are exposed through COM, such as Windows...

This one’s for you, Mom

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I am the product of a single parent, my mom, who along with my grandparents helped raise me into the man I am today. I cannot fathom what it took for my mom, who worked three jobs to put herself through college to be a teacher, to...

DirectX, OpenFOAM, Libbiosig vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed vulnerabilities in the BioSig Project Libbiosig library and OpenCFD OpenFOAM, as well as an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft DirectX. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective...

Agentic AI security: Why you need to know about autonomous agents now

Agentic AI is making headlines worldwide for its potential force-multiplying capabilities, and organizations are understandably intrigued by how it can improve throughput and capabilities. However, as with any technological revolution, unforeseen issues are inevitable, and agentic AI is no...

Spinning complex ideas into clear docs with Kri Dontje

Welcome back! This week, we're shining a spotlight on Kri Dontje, a technical writer who's become an essential voice in making Cisco Talos' work understandable for a wide audience. With a background in technical communications and a career that began at a small startup, Kri discusses the importan...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2026 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

Microsoft has released its monthly security update for March 2026 which includes 79 vulnerabilities, including three that Microsoft marked as "critical." The remaining vulnerabilities listed are classified as "important." Microsoft assessed that exploitation of the three "critical" vulnerabilitie...

Patch, track, repeat: The 2025 CVE retrospective

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. It's time to look back at a year that pushed the vulnerability landscape to new heights. I'll admit this retrospective is arriving a bit later than planned. With 48,196 CVEs in 2025 a stunning 132 vulnerabilities per day, the analysi...

UAT-9244 targets South American telecommunication providers with three new malware implants

Cisco Talos is disclosing UAT-9244, who we assess with high confidence is a China-nexus advanced persistent threat APT actor closely associated with Famous Sparrow. Since 2024, UAT-9244 has targeted critical telecommunications infrastructure, including Windows and Linux-based endpoints and edge...

Update, March 13: Talos on the developing situation in the Middle East

Update history Date | Description of updates ---|--- March 13, 2026 | Talos' assessment of the cyber attack on Stryker and the elevated threat landscape. Key findings and background on Handala, the Iranian-linked threat group. March 10, 2026 | Updated guidance and recommendations, IOCs, and...

Henry IV, Hotspur, Hal, and hallucinations

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " 'Tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety." - Hotspur, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1: Act 2 Scene 3 I get it. Hotspur is the...

New Dohdoor malware campaign targets education and health care

Cisco Talos discovered an ongoing malicious campaign since at least as early as December 2025 by a threat actor we track as "UAT-10027," delivering a previously undisclosed backdoor dubbed "Dohdoor." Dohdoor utilizes the DNS-over-HTTPS DoH technique for command-and-control C2 communications and h...

Active exploitation of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN by UAT-8616

Cisco Talos is tracking the active exploitation of CVE-2026-20127, a vulnerability in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller, formerly vSmart, that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on the affected system by sending a crafted request...