Cisco Talos Blog

December 20, 2022 08:00

Threat Spotlight: XLLing in Excel - threat actors using malicious add-ins

As more and more users adopt new versions of Microsoft Office, it is likely that threat actors will turn away from VBA-based malicious documents to other formats such as XLLs or rely on exploiting newly discovered vulnerabilities to launch malicious code.

September 28, 2022 08:12

New campaign uses government, union-themed lures to deliver Cobalt Strike beacons

Cisco Talos recently discovered a malicious campaign with a modularised attack technique to deliver Cobalt Strike beacons on infected endpoints.

September 1, 2022 13:35

ModernLoader delivers multiple stealers, cryptominers and RATs

* Cisco Talos recently observed three separate, but related, campaigns between March and June 2022 delivering a variety of threats, including the ModernLoader bot, RedLine information-stealer and cryptocurrency-mining malware to victims. * The actors use PowerShell, .NET assemb

August 9, 2022 16:44

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for August 2022 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities

Microsoft released its monthly security update Tuesday, disclosing more than 120 vulnerabilities across its line of products and software, the most in a single Patch Tuesday in four months. This batch of updates also includes a fix for a new vulnerability in the Microsoft Window

February 9, 2022 08:05

What’s with the shared VBA code between Transparent Tribe and other threat actors?

Recently, we've been researching several threat actors operating in South Asia: Transparent Tribe, SideCopy, etc., that deploy a range of remote access trojans (RATs). After a hunting session in our malware sample repositories and VirusTotal while looking into these actors, w

January 12, 2022 08:02

Nanocore, Netwire and AsyncRAT spreading campaign uses public cloud infrastructure

* Cisco Talos discovered a malicious campaign in October 2021 delivering variants of Nanocore, Netwire and AsyncRATs targeting user's information. * According to Cisco Secure product telemetry, the victims of this campaign are primarily distributed across the United States,

November 16, 2021 07:00

Attackers use domain fronting technique to target Myanmar with Cobalt Strike

By Chetan Raghuprasad, Vanja Svajcer and Asheer Malhotra. News Summary * Cisco Talos discovered a new malicious campaign using a leaked version of Cobalt Strike in September 2021. * This shows that Cobalt Strike, although it was originally created as a legitimate tool, cont

August 12, 2021 08:00

Signed MSI files, Raccoon and Amadey are used for installing ServHelper RAT

By Vanja Svajcer. News summary * Group TA505 has been active for at least seven years, making wide-ranging connections with other threat actors involved in ransomware, stealing credit card numbers and exfiltrating data. One of the common tools in TA505's arsenal is ServH

June 3, 2021 08:00

Necro Python bot adds new exploits and Tezos mining to its bag of tricks

By Vanja Svajcer, with contributions from Caitlin Huey and Kendall McKay. News summary * Some malware families stay static in terms of their functionality. But a newly discovered malware campaign utilizing the Necro Python bot shows this actor is adding new functionality and