Cisco Talos Blog

April 11, 2019 13:37

Sextortion profits decline despite higher volume, new techniques

Sextortion spammers continue blasting away at high volume. The success they experienced with several high-profile campaigns last year has led these attackers to continue transmitting massive amounts of sextortion email. These sextortion spammers have been doing everything they ca

April 5, 2019 09:00

Hiding in plain sight: How adversaries are using Facebook groups

Cisco Talos is continually working to ensure that our threat intelligence not only accounts for the latest threats but also new versions of old threats, such as spam. This often means pursuing cybercriminals wherever they congregate. However, instead of wheeling-and-dealing using

December 14, 2018 12:57

Bitcoin Bomb Scare Associated with Sextortion Scammers

The claims in the emails we've seen from this actor are completely false, yet they have caused untold amounts of damage as organizations have evacuated buildings and called upon law enforcement to investigate.

October 31, 2018 10:31

Anatomy of a sextortion scam

While these attacks have been in the wild for months, Talos wanted to take a closer look at some of these campaigns to see why users were being tricked into sending the attackers large amounts of bitcoin despite the attackers' empty threats.

January 18, 2018 11:02

The Many Tentacles of the Necurs Botnet

This post was written by Jaeson Schultz. Introduction Over the past five years the Necurs botnet has established itself as the largest purveyor of spam worldwide. Necurs is responsible for emailing massive amounts of banking malware, ransomware, dating spam, pump-n-dump stock s

August 7, 2017 15:05

On Conveying Doubt

This post was authored by Matt Olney. Typically, Talos has the luxury of time when conducting research. We can carefully draft a report that clearly lays out the evidence and leads the reader to a clear understanding of our well supported findings. A great deal of time is spent

December 19, 2016 08:00

In the Eye of the Hailstorm

This blog post was authored by Jakob Dohrmann, David Rodriguez, and Jaeson Schultz. The Cisco Talos and Umbrella research teams are deploying a distributed hailstorm detection system which brings together machine learning, stream processing of DNS requests and the curated Talos