TALOS

By Vanja Svajcer 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 assemblies, and HTA and VBS files to spread across a targeted network, eventually dropping other pieces of malware, such as the SystemBC trojan and DCRAT, to enable various stages of their operations. The attackers' use of a variety of off-the-shelf tools makes it difficult to attribute this activity to a specific adversary. The final payload appears to be ModernLoader, which acts as a remote access trojan (RAT) by collecting system information and deploying various modules. In the earlier campaigns from March, we also observed the attackers delivering the cryptocurrency mining malware XMRig. The March campaigns appeared to be targeting Eastern European users, as the constructor utility we analyzed had...

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Aug. 19 and Aug. 26. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics, indicators of compromise, and discussing how our customers are automatically protected from these threats. As a reminder, the information provided for the following threats in this post is non-exhaustive and current as of the date of publication. Additionally, please keep in mind that IOC searching is only one part of threat hunting. Spotting a single IOC does not necessarily indicate maliciousness. Detection and coverage for the following threats is subject to updates, pending additional threat or vulnerability analysis. For the most current information, please refer to your Firepower Management Center, Snort.org, or ClamAV.net. For each threat described below, this blog post only lists 2...

By Jon Munshaw.  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was once the most talked about story in the world. Six months into the conflict, modern attention spans have moved on to other news stories. But Ukraine Independence Day yesterday should serve as a reminder to everyone that the threats to Ukraine have not gone anywhere.  The country still faces a physical conflict with Russia every day that seemingly has no easy end, and the barrage of cyber attacks is suspected to continue.   As discussed in our livestream yesterday, Talos continues to see evolving cybersecurity threats in the region, including the most recent GoMet backdoor. And as Joe Marshall highlighted in his blog post last week, Ukraine’s agriculture industry — which is vital to the global food supply chain — remains vulnerable to kinetic and virtual attacks. Because there’s been no one major cyber attack against Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began, the larg...

On Independence Day for Ukraine, Aug. 24, 2022, Cisco Talos provided a live update on its continued support for the region.   Six months since the invasion of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Dmytro Korzhevin, a senior threat intelligence researcher, JJ Cummings, Talos' national intelligence principal, and Ashlee Benge, a strategic intelligence lead, provided insights into their past few months of work in the region. The discussion primarily focused on the resiliency of Ukrainians, who have worked tirelessly over the years to transform their cybersecurity capabilities. Ukrainian infrastructure has largely stayed operational and, in most cases, exceeded expectations. It seems to have baffled most pundits, but for those that have spent years working in Ukraine, it’s no surprise about the levels of dedication and commitment to protecting their critical infrastructure from those that would do it harm.   The team also covered how groundwork laid years ago is paying dividends now during t...

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Aug. 12 and Aug. 19. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics, indicators of compromise, and discussing how our customers are automatically protected from these threats. As a reminder, the information provided for the following threats in this post is non-exhaustive and current as of the date of publication. Additionally, please keep in mind that IOC searching is only one part of threat hunting. Spotting a single IOC does not necessarily indicate maliciousness. Detection and coverage for the following threats is subject to updates, pending additional threat or vulnerability analysis. For the most current information, please refer to your Firepower Management Center, Snort.org, or ClamAV.net. For each threat described below, this blog post only lists 2...

By Jon Munshaw.  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.  As the data privacy landscape gets increasingly murky, app developers and device manufacturers are finding new ways to sure up users’ personal information. Of course, all users have to do is go out of their way to opt-in.  Apple recently announced a new Lockdown Mode for the iOS operating system that powers the company’s iPhones. When enabled, it turns off many of the features that attackers will exploit when targeting a mobile device with spyware. Spyware is a growing concern across the world, especially the NSO Group’s Pegasus tool.   With Lockdown Mode enabled, a hypothetical attacker would not have access to certain functions on the phone, and it blocks access to important APIs such as speech and facial recognition, which research has shown are relatively easy to bypass.  In a review of Lockdown Mode, Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch said, “...we didn’t find using our iPhone in Lockdown Mode t...

By Joe Marshall. The war in Ukraine has had far-reaching global implications and one of the most immediate effects felt will be on the global supply chain for food. This war-induced fragility has exposed the weaknesses of how we feed ourselves globally. Ransomware cartels and other adversaries are well aware of this and are actively exploiting that fragility.  For the past six years, Cisco Talos has been actively involved in assisting public and private institutions in Ukraine to defend themselves against state-sponsored actors. Our involvement stretches the gamut from commercial to critical infrastructure, to election security. Our presence has afforded us unique opportunities and observations about cybersecurity in a macro and micro way. Ukraine has been a frequent victim of state-sponsored cyber attacks aimed at critical infrastructures like power and transportation. Talos is proud to stand with our partners in Ukraine and help defend their critical networks and help users there ma...

Claudio Bozzato of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Blog by Jon Munshaw.  Cisco Talos recently discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the WWBN AVideo web application that could allow an attacker to carry out a wide range of malicious actions, including command injection and authentication bypass.  AVideo is an open-source web application that allows users to build a video streaming and sharing platform. Anyone who joins the community can host videos on-demand, launch a live stream or encode different video formats.  TALOS-2022-1542 (CVE-2022-32777 - CVE-2022-32778), TALOS-2022-1549 (CVE-2022-32761) and TALOS-2022-1550 (CVE-2022-28710) are information disclosure vulnerabilities that are triggered if an adversary sends the targeted instance a specially crafted HTTP packet. TALOS-2022-1550 and TALOS-2022-1549 could allow the adversary to read arbitrarily selected files, while TALOS-2022-1542 could allow them to steal the session cookie.  Some of the most serious vulnerabili...

Dave McDaniel of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities. Blog by Jon Munshaw.  Cisco Talos recently discovered three vulnerabilities in a library that works with the HDF5 file format that could allow an attacker to execute remote code on a targeted device.  These issues arise in the libhdf5 gif2h5 tool that’s normally used to convert a GIF file to the HDF5 format, commonly used to store large amounts of numerical data. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted, malicious file. TALOS-2022-1485 (CVE-2022-25972) and TALOS-2022-1486 (CVE-2022-25942) are out-of-bounds write vulnerabilities in the gif2h5 tool that trigger a specific crash, opening the door for code execution from the adversary. TALOS-2022-1487 (CVE-2022-26061) works similarly but is a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability.  Cisco Talos is disclosing these vulnerabilities despite no official fix from HDF5 in adherence to the 90-day deadline outlined in Cisco...

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Aug. 5 and Aug. 12. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics, indicators of compromise, and discussing how our customers are automatically protected from these threats. As a reminder, the information provided for the following threats in this post is non-exhaustive and current as of the date of publication. Additionally, please keep in mind that IOC searching is only one part of threat hunting. Spotting a single IOC does not necessarily indicate maliciousness. Detection and coverage for the following threats is subject to updates, pending additional threat or vulnerability analysis. For the most current information, please refer to your Firepower Management Center, Snort.org, or ClamAV.net. For each threat described below, this blog post only lists 25...