Curiouser and Curiouser

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " Experiment is the mother of knowledge." ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time " Don't slide down the rabbit hole. The way down is a breeze, but climbing back's a battle." ― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter Hacker Summer Camp...

Dissecting the JWR phishing framework

Cisco Talos recently identified an undocumented phishing framework, internally branded "JWR" by its developer, built to convincingly impersonate checkout and login pages across major payment and shopping platforms. The client engine of the JWR phishing framework is a real-time, operator-driven...

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

Microsoft has released its monthly security update for August 2026, which includes 421 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 62 that Microsoft marked as "critical." Microsoft notes that 1 of the vulnerabilities disclosed this month have been exploited in the wild CVE-2026-68820...

Why metaphor may dictate your security strategy

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Metaphor is a powerful tool for understanding emerging issues in cybersecurity. Framing the unfamiliar in terms of the well understood helps us remove the burden of extraneous detail to draw focus to the real issues. Recent reports o...

“Keep going, bro. You’ve got this!” A data-driven look at how adversaries are weaponizing AI

Actor usage of AI is exploding. By analyzing artifacts left behind, Talos has created a detailed analysis of how we are seeing adversaries leverage the technology to include development, force multiplication, and vulnerability research. Based on the evidence Talos gathered, guardrails did not...

[Webinar] Tales from the Frontlines: An exclusive briefing on Q2 incidents

!\Webinar\ Tales from the Frontlines: An exclusive briefing on Q2 incidentshttps://storage.ghost.io/c/af/a0/afa04ee3-414f-4481-8d23-7e7c146f192e/content/images/2026/08/2-1-no-copy.jpg Have you ever read the Talos IR Quarterly Trends report and wondered, "How did that phishing or ransomware campai...

You were onto something with “It’s the Climb,” Miley

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. For my fiancee's 30th birthday, I took her on a weekend trip to Shenandoah National Park - a favorite of ours since we went to a wedding there several years back. We've done several incredible hikes over the years, but one in...

Black Hat special: Rewind and revisit

Cybersecurity is rarely a straight line. In this special Black Hat edition of Humans of Talos, Amy looks back at the incredible journeys that brought past guests to the world of threat intelligence. From forensic labs and newsrooms to the kitchen line, we're revisiting the stories and lessons tha...

IR Trends Q2 2026: Phishing and weaponized remote management tools drive attack chains

Phishing was the primary means of gaining initial access this quarter, appearing in over half of all Cisco Talos Incident Response Talos IR engagements - an increase from approximately a third of engagements last quarter. Attackers continued to innovate their delivery methods to evade defenses,...

Don’t swing at everything

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Lately I've found myself thinking a lot about the Australian TV series Mr. Inbetween IMDb 8.7/10 -- not because I'm a hitman for hire, but because I literally feel in-between. Specifically, in-between what I'd call the "pre-Mythos" a...

Chaos ransomware's msaRAT: Living off the browser to build a covert C2 channel

Cisco Talos has discovered a new Rust-based remote access trojan RAT we call "msaRAT" attributed to the Chaos ransomware group. The name is derived from the binding names found in the binary: "msaOpen," "msaClose," "msaError," and "msaMessage". msaRAT is implemented using the Tokio asynchronous...

Preview: Cisco Talos at Black Hat USA 2026

We're looking forward to having some great conversations with those of you heading to the desert for Hacker Summer Camp 2026. We have a presence within the Cisco and Splunk booth 2633 during Black Hat where you can chat to us about our latest threat research, incident response, and how Talos powe...

Begun, the Patch Wars have

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. We all knew, to some degree or another, that this summer was going to a hot mess. I don't mean FIFA drama or record setting heat waves. I mean the slow but steady momentum that AI frontier models were accruing for vulnerability...

The Hunter's Paradox: Is it time to embrace automated threat hunting?

Should we let AI run our threat hunts? The debate usually splits into two camps. One says, "Yes, obviously! The sheer scale of our security telemetry is impossible for humans to deal with." The other says, "Absolutely not! You can't trust an AI with something this important." The thing is, I thin...

UAT-11795 deploys novel Starland RAT and bespoke WLDR C2 implant in financially motivated campaign

Cisco Talos is disclosing UAT-11795, a sophisticated, Russian-speaking, financially motivated adversary that has been conducting a malicious campaign targeting users in the U.S. and Europe since at least June 2025. Talos has discovered that the actor in this campaign delivers a Python-based remot...

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

Microsoft has released its monthly security update for July 2026, which includes 622 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 57 that Microsoft marked as "critical." Microsoft notes that two of the vulnerabilities disclosed this month have been exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-5615...

[Video] Where protection starts: Cisco Talos Intelligence Integrations

!\Video\ Where protection starts: Cisco Talos Intelligence Integrationshttps://storage.ghost.io/c/af/a0/afa04ee3-414f-4481-8d23-7e7c146f192e/content/images/2026/07/Talosintegrationsheader-2.jpg Cybersecurity has always involved elements of uncertainty. Every day, security teams are asked to make...

The serpent’s tongue: Luring the Python out of its den

Python's popularity, readable syntax, and extensive third-party library ecosystem make it an attractive target for threat actors seeking to compromise developer devices and infrastructure. Malicious packages and supply-chain attacks are increasingly common, exploiting the trust built into Python'...

WolfSSL, GeoVision, VTK vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed three vulnerabilities in WolfSSF, fourteen in GeoVision, and one vulnerability in VTK-DICOM. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, in adherence to Cisco 's third-party...

Winning 54% of the time

Welcome to this week's Threat Source newsletter. There's a fairly cliche phrase in cybersecurity that I'm sure our audience is familiar with: Attackers only need to be right once, whereas defenders need to be right 100% of the time. I guess it captures the asymmetry of this industry, but I've nev...

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...

Catan and Mouse

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " I do not know everything; still many things I understand." ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time " Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition." ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door T...

Martin Lee: Running through the Arctic (and the threat landscape)

Ever wonder how someone goes from studying human viruses to leading cybersecurity teams? In this Humans of Talos, we're joined by Martin Lee, EMEA Lead, to talk about his journey into the industry. Martin takes us back to the early days of the internet, explaining how he made the leap from academ...

ARToken: Inside an EvilTokens affiliate panel targeting Microsoft 365

Cisco Talos identified a fully-featured phishing-as-a-service PhaaS operator panel, branded "ARToken," that shares infrastructure, API contracts, and operational patterns with the EvilTokens platform documented by Sekoia and Microsoft in early 2026. The ARToken panel exposes 80+ API endpoints for...

Beyond IOCs: AI-enabled threat intelligence

Welcome to this week's Threat Source newsletter. The issue of AI in cybersecurity is often portrayed as a binary choice: either a force multiplier for our adversaries, or a tool bringing professional obsolescence. The reality is more nuanced. While AI certainly brings some advantage to attackers,...

Introduction to COM usage by Windows threats

Component Object Model COM is a fundamental Windows technology used by legitimate applications for object activation, inter-process communication, automation and language-independent component reuse. Those same qualities make it useful to threat actors. Malware frequently uses COM interfaces for...

Close Encounters of the Human Kind

Welcome to this week's Threat Source newsletter. I love a Spielberg summer. His ability to imbue a sense of wonder, awe, curiosity, and connection means he's in a league of his own. Granted, I haven't felt that from him in a while, but when he hits? Oof. I feel like I need somebody to reach acros...

Scripting the disassembler: Local agentic reverse engineering through vbdec’s live COM object model

Analysis tools do not need AI built in to support agentic workflows; they simply need to expose their data through an external scripting interface. Even traditional graphical user interface GUI applications can be made AI-accessible by publishing their internal object models, allowing agents to...

A tale of two eras

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. To the surprise of absolutely no one who has seen my face, I'm one of the younger employees at Talos. As my industry veteran colleagues were buying the first iPods, navigating the switch from dial-up to broadband, saying goodbye to...

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

Microsoft has released its monthly security update for June 2026, which includes 206 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 32 that Microsoft marked as "critical". Out of 32 "critical" entries, 28 are remote code execution RCE vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows services and...

Reporting from Vegas: Networking, AI, and good boys

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Howdy friends, and hello from Cisco Live U.S., here in sunny and very hot Las Vegas! An interesting quirk of being sent to one of these events is you learn to understand your limits as a person. Cisco Live is a three-day event, and i...

Winning the cyber marathon with Tony Giandomenico

In the high-speed world of cybersecurity, the difference between a breach and a breakthrough often comes down to endurance. Tony Giandomenico, Senior Director of Product Management with Cisco Talos, joins me to discuss how he balances the intensity of leading major product launches with the...

Hypotheses, telemetry, and human judgment: Inside Cisco Talos Threat Hunting

By Ron Scott-Adams Most security tools operate on a simple principle: If a known-bad pattern appears, fire an alert. This works well enough for many threats, but it fails against adversaries who closely study detection thresholds and deliberately stay under them. Cisco Talos Threat Hunting operat...

Less panic patching, more precision

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Recently, Martin closed his introduction with a warning: Ready or not, the time of much patching is coming. I've been chewing on that one for a while because I'm rethinking my own enrichment pipelines along these lines, and the...

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...

MediaArea heap-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed four vulnerabilities in MediaArea MediaInfoLib library. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendor, in adherence to Cisco 's third-party vulnerability disclosure policy. For...

Introducing EvidenceForge: Synthetic security logs that don’t look (as) fake

Security teams need high-quality, labeled datasets to train threat hunters and incident responders, validate detection logic, and develop robust analytic models. EvidenceForge helps teams overcome the limitations of anonymized or stale public datasets, while avoiding the cost and complexity of...

The art of being ungovernable

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could, I never heard of it." ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men Most of my career has been built on dichotomy:...

TP-Link, Photoshop, OpenVPN, Norton VPN vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos' Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed eight vulnerabilities in TP-Link, and one each in Adobe Photoshop, OpenVPN, and Gen Digital's Norton VPN. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, in adherence to Cisco 's...

From PDB strings to MaaS: Tracking a commodity BadIIS ecosystem used by Chinese-speaking threat

Cisco Talos has uncovered a BadIIS variant -- identifiable by its embedded "demo.pdb" strings -- that functions as commodity malware. This variant is likely sold or shared among multiple Chinese-speaking cybercrime groups that operate under a malware-as-a-service MaaS model for continuous...

The time of much patching is coming

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Many solutions have been proposed to reduce software bugs: zero-defect mandates, pair programming, formal methods, and mathematical software proofs. The reality is that software engineering is hard. Identifying and fixing bugs before...

Ongoing exploitation of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos is tracking the active exploitation of CVE-2026-20182, an authentication bypass vulnerability in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller, formerly SD-WAN vSmart, and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage. Successful exploitation of CVE-2026-20182 allows an unauthenticated,...

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...

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

By Jaeson Schultz Microsoft has released its monthly security update for May 2026, which includes 137 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 31 that Microsoft marked as "critical". In this month's release, Microsoft has not observed any of the included vulnerabilities being...

State-sponsored actors, better known as the friends you don’t want

State-sponsored actors don't break in. They log in, and they use your own tools to stay invisible for months. Responding to a state-sponsored threat is nothing like responding to ransomware, and the differences can make or break the outcome. From logging and baselines to OT segmentation and suppl...

Unplug your way to better code

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Hey, you. Yeah, you! The person endlessly scrolling or typing away at their computer. Did you touch grass today? It's just an expression, but if nature's your thing, that works just fine. What I do mean is that due to the nature of t...

Insights into the clustering and reuse of phone numbers in scam emails

Cisco Talos has recently started to collect and gather intelligence around phone numbers within emails as an additional indicator of compromise IOC. In this blog, we discuss new insights into in-the-wild phone number reuse in scam emails. According to Talos' observations, the ease of API-driven...

UAT-8302 and its box full of malware

Cisco Talos is disclosing UAT-8302, a sophisticated, China-nexus advanced persistent threat APT group targeting government entities in South America since at least late 2024 and government agencies in southeastern Europe in 2025. After successful compromises, UAT-8302 deploys multiple custom-made...

CloudZ RAT potentially steals OTP messages using Pheno plugin

Cisco Talos discovered an intrusion, active since at least January 2026, where an unknown attacker implanted a CloudZ remote access tool RAT and a previously undocumented plugin called "Pheno." According to the functionalities of the CloudZ RAT and Pheno plugin, this was with the intention of...

Great responsibility, without great power

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. As I'm writing this, today April 28 is International Superhero Day. If you don't know the origin story behind this, perhaps you would assume that this day was dreamed up by Marvel. And… you would be correct. However, it's not a pure...