Reverse Social Engineering Tech Support Scammers
This post is authored by Jaime Filson and Dave Liebenberg. Background A mosaic made up of 1-800 tech support scam websites The amount of fraudulent actors masquerading as legitimate tech support has been on the rise since 2008. According to David Finn, executive director a
Domains of the Living Dead
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “If you’re ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you’re ready for any emergency.” While events haven’t yet risen to the level of “zombie apocalypse”, computer attackers are continuing to use their voodoo to zombify
Cisco Identifies Multiple Vulnerabilities in Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd)
Cisco is committed to improving the overall security of the products and services our customers rely on. As part of this commitment, Cisco assesses the security of software components used in our products. Open source software plays a key role in many Cisco products and as a resu
Dangerous Clipboard: Analysis of the MS15-072 Patch
This post was authored by Marcin Noga with contributions from Jaeson Schultz. Have you ever thought about how security researchers take a patch that has been released, and then reverse it to find the underlying security issue? Well, back In July Microsoft released security bulle
Project Aspis
One of the hardest jobs on the Internet is to work the abuse desk at a hosting provider. These teams have to strike a difficult balance between protecting their customers, ensuring that their services aren’t being abused by malicious actors and delivering the service and conven
Microsoft Patch Tuesday - October 2015
Microsoft's Patch Tuesday has arrived. Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release is fairly light with a total of 6 bulletins released addressing 33 vulnerabili
Threat Spotlight: Cisco Talos Thwarts Access to Massive International Exploit Kit Generating $60M Annually From Ransomware Alone
This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Joel Esler, Nick Hebert, Warren Mercer, Matt Olney, Melissa Taylor, and Craig Williams. Executive Summary Today, Cisco struck a blow to a group of hackers, disrupting a significant international revenue stream gener
Down the Rabbit Hole: Botnet Analysis for Non-Reverse Engineers
This post is authored by Earl Carter & Holger Unterbrink. Overview Talos is often tasked with mapping the backend network for a specific piece of malware. One approach is to first reverse engineer the sample and determine exactly how it operates. But what if there is no tim
SYNful Knock Scanner
This post was authored by William McVey. Update 2015-09-23: We updated the tool to version 1.0.1 Talos is constantly researching the ways in which threat actors are evolving to exploit systems. Recently, a piece of persistent malware coined as “SYNful Knock” was discovered on C