At Cisco Talos, we need customers to be able to provide feedback at all times, whether it be about false positives, false negatives, or missed categories. Because we deal with an abundance of data across our platforms — such as IPS alerts, AMP alerts and more — feedback helps us test the efficacy of those alerts and systems promptly.

Today, there are several ways of doing this: calling Cisco Support (aka TAC), submitting a dispute through Talosintelligence.com, or securityhub.cisco.com, plus a myriad of other ways — each winding up in a different “system” for Talos to deal with on our side. The days of that confusion are numbered.

We’ve been silently working on a streamlined experience, not only for the customers but for our workflow as well.  We asked ourselves the question, “What is the easiest way we can enable a customer to get disputes to us, deal with it the fastest way possible, and get that information back to the customer in the most efficient manner?”

The merging of senderbase.org into talosintelligence.com started to make this easier. The merge allowed any user on the internet to look up the reputation of any IP or domain and see any information Talos has on that entry at the time. We enabled this through, what we call, the Talos Reputation Center. This not only gave users the ability to look something up manually, but also gave them information about who the highest volume senders were, or data by network owner or even by country.

This provided the ability for a customer to directly dispute the findings of our systems by clicking this link:

That would take the customer to our dispute support center.  Hundreds of tickets a week flow into this system and are processed by our team. This was carried over from the senderbase.org website, and was for non-customers.

Earlier this year, we set off on a journey to make filing disputes with Talos easy for customers and free users (senderbase.org legacy users) alike. We’re doing this through Talosintelligence.com.

Next week, we’ll be taking this a step further — we’re going to be changing how the dispute system functions. We will require users to log in with their CCO ID (Cisco Connection Online ID). We’ve had this in a silent beta for the past two weeks, and already more than 600 people have logged into Talosintelligence.com using their CCO ID.

Starting July 30, this will be mandatory for everyone wishing to file a dispute on Talosintelligence.com. If a user does not have a CCO ID through Cisco, they will be asked to create a guest account (which is free).

There are numerous benefits to this change. The new dispute system will link the dispute ticketing system and our analysts closely together. This will allow greater interactivity between our analysts and customers, allowing our customers to log into their account on Talosintelligence.com and see the resolution of every dispute they have ever filed through the new system. It will set the stage for further consolidation of ticketing systems later this year, which we will announce closer to the rollout.

We look forward to providing users with a better customer experience through the dispute system on the website. More information will be coming over the next couple of months during the rollout.