TALOS

By Jon Munshaw.  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.  Everyone seems to want to create the next “Netflix” of something. Xbox’s Game Pass is the “Netflix of video games.” Rent the Runway is a “Netflix of fashion” where customers subscribe to a rotation of fancy clothes.  And now threat actors are looking to be the “Netflix of malware.” All categories of malware have some sort of "as-a-service" twist now. Some of the largest ransomware groups in the world operate “as a service,” allowing smaller groups to pay a fee in exchange for using the larger group’s tools.   Our latest report on information-stealers points out that “infostealers as-a-service" are growing in popularity, and our researchers also discovered a new “C2 as-a-service" platform where attackers can pay to have this third-party site act as their command and control. And like Netflix, this Dark Utilities site offers several other layers of tools and malware to choose from. This is a parti...

Executive summary On May 24, 2022, Cisco became aware of a potential compromise. Since that point, Cisco Security Incident Response (CSIRT) and Cisco Talos have been working to remediate.  During the investigation, it was determined that a Cisco employee’s credentials were compromised after an attacker gained control of a personal Google account where credentials saved in the victim’s browser were being synchronized.  The attacker conducted a series of sophisticated voice phishing attacks under the guise of various trusted organizations attempting to convince the victim to accept multi-factor authentication (MFA) push notifications initiated by the attacker. The attacker ultimately succeeded in achieving an MFA push acceptance, granting them access to VPN in the context of the targeted user.  CSIRT and Talos are responding to the event and we have not identified any evidence suggesting that the attacker gained access to critical internal systems, such as those related to product dev...

By Jon Munshaw and Vanja Svajcer. 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 Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) that’s actively being exploited in the wild, according to Microsoft. MSDT was already the target of the so-called “Follina” zero-day vulnerability in June.   In all, August’s Patch Tuesday includes 15 critical vulnerabilities and a single low- and moderate-severity issue. The remainder is classified as “important.”  Two of the important vulnerabilities CVE-2022-35743 and CVE-2022-34713 are remote code execution vulnerabilities in MSDT. However, only CVE-2022-34713 has been exploited in the wild and Microsoft considers it “more likely” to be exploited. Microsoft Exchange Server contains two critical elevation of privilege vulnerabilities, CVE-2...

By Nick Biasini. The cybersecurity industry tends to focus on extremely large-scale or sophisticated, state-sponsored attacks. Rightfully so, as it can be the most interesting, technically speaking. When most people think of cybercrime they think of large-scale breaches because that's what dominates the headlines. However, the problem is much bigger. In 2021, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received a staggering 847,376 complaints, with each victim losing a little more than $8,000 on average. Once you account for the high-value breaches, the true impact is even lower. The average person is far more likely to have their identity stolen or fall victim to some other sort of scam than be directly affected by a large-scale breach — and business is booming. A deeper look at the data from IC3 shows that the amount of complaints and revenue being generated from cybercrime continues to rise. Interestingly there is a huge jump in cybercrime during the pandemic with a staggering increa...

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between July 29 and Aug. 5. 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...

Cisco Talos today announced the release of a new mechanism that allows Cisco Secure Email customers the option to submit Sender Domain Reputation (SDR) disputes through TalosIntelligence.com. Customers now have the option of receiving self-service support through TalosIntelligence.com or may continue engaging with TAC. This new feature improves efficiency for Secure Email customers by streamlining the SDR dispute ticket process. Users can submit email sender domains and email addresses for investigation if they believe a domain or address should be marked as malicious or has been wrongfully marked as malicious. Please provide as much data as possible to assist our investigation team.

By Jon Munshaw.  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.  After what seems like forever and honestly has been a really long time, we’re heading back to BlackHat in-person this year. We’re excited to see a lot of old friends again to commiserate, hang out, trade stories and generally talk about security.   Throughout the two days of the main conference, we’ll have a full suite of flash talks at the Cisco Secure booth and several sponsored talks. Since this is the last edition of the newsletter before BlackHat starts, it’s probably worthwhile running through all the cool stuff we’ll have going on at Hacker Summer Camp.  Our booth should be easy enough to find — it’s right by the main entrance to Bayside B. If you get to the Trellix Lounge, you’ve gone too far north. Our researchers will be there to answer any questions you have and present on a wide variety of security topics, from research into Adobe vulnerabilities to the privacy effects of the overtur...

By Edmund Brumaghin, Azim Khodjibaev and Matt Thaxton, with contributions from Arnaud Zobec. Executive Summary Dark Utilities, released in early 2022, is a platform that provides full-featured C2 capabilities to adversaries. It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems. Payloads provided by the platform support Windows, Linux and Python-based implementations and are hosted within the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), making them resilient to content moderation or law enforcement intervention. Since its initial release, we've observed malware samples in the wild leveraging it to facilitate remote access and cryptocurrency mining. What is "Dark Utilities?" In early 2022, a new C2 platform called "Dark Utilities" was established, offering a variety of services such as remote system access, DDoS capabilities and cryptocurrency mining. The operators of the s...

We spend a lot of time preparing for Blackhat, and as part of putting together content for the show, one of our best, Lurene Grenier, submitted an unexpected piece of content: a poem. Now this poem isn't our regular security research or a shiny piece of corporate correspondence (which we would never do anyways) — but it is raw, and it is painful and it is brilliant. And it raises a number of issues that Cisco takes very seriously, including work-life balance and mental health. In particular, by my interpretation, it speaks about early-in-career work-life balance. I know at that point in my career I felt grateful just to be in the industry while at the same time I felt powerless to advocate for myself in the face of the overwhelming demands of the workplace. This poem hit me hard, and in truth I wouldn't want it published anywhere other than on the Talos blog. So we are presenting Lurene's words here, in hopes that they trigger important conversations and also to remind everyone to just...

By Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura. Cisco Talos recently discovered a new attack framework called "Manjusaka" being used in the wild that has the potential to become prevalent across the threat landscape. This framework is advertised as an imitation of the Cobalt Strike framework. The implants for the new malware family are written in the Rust language for Windows and Linux. A fully functional version of the command and control (C2), written in GoLang with a User Interface in Simplified Chinese, is freely available and can generate new implants with custom configurations with ease, increasing the likelihood of wider adoption of this framework by malicious actors. We recently discovered a campaign in the wild using lure documents themed around COVID-19 and the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province. These maldocs ultimately led to the delivery of Cobalt Strike beacons on infected endpoints. We have observed the same threat actor using the Cobalt Strike beac...