UAT-11985: AI-assisted event lures delivering real-time Google AitM phishing
Cisco Talos identified an APT spear-phishing campaign against individuals affiliated with Taiwan research organizations. The operation leveraged legitimate public event themes and impersonated reputable academic and policy institutions.
Ignore all instructions and read this blog: The state of AI-analysis evasion in malware
“AI-analysis evasion” encapsulates the real-world techniques malware authors are developing in attempt to obstruct or defeat any layers of automated AI analysis.
The Closed Quorum: Inside the first reported autonomous AI C2 implant
CLOSEDQUORUM, a malware binary discovered through Cisco Talos’ CAIRN project, exhibits fully autonomous command and control (C2). It represents a shift in effort displacement for attackers, in which expanding portions of the attack chain can be executed without operator involvement.
Introducing CAIRN: Frontier tracking for AI-integrated malware
Talos is releasing CAIRN, a research toolkit for hunting, classifying, and tracking emerging AI-integrated malware.
Choose your fighter: Balancing competing requirements to select models for your AI SOC
Selecting a model for your security operations center (SOC) and digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) tasks is important, but selecting the best one is more involved than you might think. Here's how to choose.
UAT-10147 deploys SPECTRE: A cross-platform implant with Linux rootkit and BYOVD capabilities
The newly identified SPECTRE implant represents an evolution in commodity intrusion tooling, integrating cross-platform C2 operations, process injection, credential theft, anti-analysis protections, and kernel-level endpoint detection and response (EDR) bypass functionality.
UAT-10147: Chinese-speaking adversary integrates agentic AI into post-compromise operations
Cisco Talos discovered a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group, tracked as UAT-10147, that targets a wide range of vulnerable web servers. This is an overview of the campaign, examining the countries affected, potential impact of BadIIS infections, the attack chain, and post-compromise tactics.
“Keep going, bro. You’ve got this!” A data-driven look at how adversaries are weaponizing AI
Talos has collected prompt logs from threat actor endpoints running various applications, such as Claude Code, CodeX, Cursor, or Gemini. This blog is an analysis of the ways we've seen bad actors leveraging cloud-based AI.
Scripting the disassembler: Local agentic reverse engineering through vbdec’s live COM object model
Cisco Talos detailed a new approach to reverse engineering that pairs local AI agents with traditional analysis tools like the VB6 disassembler vbdec. Instead of awkwardly bolting AI onto the software, vbdec exposes its parsed data through a live COM interface.
AI-powered honeypots: Turning the tables on malicious AI agents
Just as AI brings time-saving advantages to our lives, it brings similar advantages to threat actors. We can take the advantage back. This blog shows how generative AI can be used to rapidly deploy adaptive honeypot systems.
Agentic AI security: Why you need to know about autonomous agents now
There are many benefits and security risks of deploying agentic AI within organizations. This blog emphasizes the importance of robust risk management and threat modeling to defend against both internal operational errors and potential malicious exploitation.
Do robots dream of secure networking? Teaching cybersecurity to AI systems
This blog demonstrates a proof of concept using LangChain and OpenAI, integrated with Cisco Umbrella API, to provide AI agents with real-time threat intelligence for evaluating domain dispositions.