Cisco Talos Blog

June 21, 2022 07:58

Avos ransomware group expands with new attack arsenal

By Flavio Costa, * In a recent customer engagement, we observed a month-long AvosLocker campaign. * The attackers utilized several different tools, including Cobalt Strike, Sliver and multiple commercial network scanners. * The initial ingress point in this incident was a pa

February 8, 2022 13:57

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Feb. 2022 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

Microsoft released its monthly security update Tuesday, disclosing 51 vulnerabilities across its large collection of hardware and software. None of the vulnerabilities disclosed this month are considered “critical,” an extreme rarity for the company’s Patch Tuesdays. Additionall

July 29, 2021 13:00

Threat Spotlight: Solarmarker

By Andrew Windsor, with contributions from Chris Neal. Executive summary * Cisco Talos has observed new activity from Solarmarker, a highly modular .NET-based information stealer and keylogger. * A previous staging module, "d.m," used with this malware has been rep

June 7, 2021 08:00

Intelligence-driven disruption of ransomware campaigns

By Neil Jenkins and Matthew Olney. Note: Our guest co-author, Neil Jenkins, is the Chief Analytic Officer at the Cyber Threat Alliance. He leads the CTA's analytic efforts, focusing on the development of threat profiles, adversary playbooks and other analysis using the threa

April 7, 2021 08:06

Sowing Discord: Reaping the benefits of collaboration app abuse

As telework has become the norm throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, attackers are modifying their tactics to take advantage of the changes to employee workflows. * Attackers are leveraging collaboration platforms, such as Discord and Slack, to stay under the radar and evade organ

March 23, 2021 16:50

Defending Microsoft Exchange from encrypted attacks with Cisco Secure IPS

This blog was authored by Brandon Stultz Microsoft released fixes for several critical vulnerabilities in Exchange Server earlier this month. One of these vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-26855) — aka "ProxyLogon" — is especially dangerous. ProxyLogon is a server-side request

February 9, 2021 14:17

Kasablanka Group's LodaRAT improves espionage capabilities on Android and Windows

* The developers of LodaRAT have added Android as a targeted platform. * A new iteration of LodaRAT for Windows has been identified with improved sound recording capabilities. * The operators behind LodaRAT tied to a specific campaign targeting Bangladesh, although others h

September 29, 2020 12:41

LodaRAT Update: Alive and Well

* During our continuous monitoring of LodaRAT, Cisco Talos observed changes in the threat that add new functionality. * Multiple new versions of LodaRAT have been spotted being used in the wild. * These new versions of LodaRAT abandoned their previous obfuscation techniques.

March 31, 2020 13:23

Trickbot: A primer

The group behind Trickbot has expanded its activities beyond credential theft into leasing malware to APT groups.