Talos Takes

Talos’ spin on security news

Every week, host Jon Munshaw brings on a new guest from Talos or the broader Cisco Secure world to break down a complicated security topic in just five or 10 minutes. We cover everything from breaking news to attacker trends and emerging threats.

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  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #54: Incident response is really just the friends we made along the way

    Welcome to the unofficial incident response week at Talos! As part of the RSA Conference, we’ve released two new case studies detailing some malware cases Cisco Talos Incident Response helped resolve. Brad Garnett, this week’s guest, also released a new blog post where he wrote about why incident response is “the ultimate team sport.” Brad joins host Jon Munshaw this week to take a deeper dive into one of these engagements, in which an attacker tried to use Cobalt Strike to infect a target with ransomware (hint: this would have been really bad!) Brad talks about how the strong personal relationships CTIR built with the customer in question set everyone up for success.

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    Run Time: 00:08:14

    Keywords
    • incident response
    • Cobalt Strike
    • ransomware

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #52: Why not a world passwordless day?

    To celebrate World Password Day this week, we’re talking about getting rid of passwords! Dave Lewis, a global advisory CISO for Cisco Secure, joins Jon to talk about all things passwordless. This is a new initiative Cisco Secure and Duo have undertaken to get network administrators to move away from using passwords in favor of other forms of authentication. Jon and Dave discuss why passwords can be dangerous, the benefits of going passwordless and how to convince longtime users to ditch traditional login credentials.

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    Run Time: 00:09:40

    Keywords
    • passwords
    • passwordless
    • MFA
    • Duo

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #51: COVID and tax scams go hand-in-hand this year

    We can set our watches to tax scams every year in April. The bad guys are always looking to steal your information, promising to get you a bigger tax return or do your taxes for you. This year is a bit different because Tax Day is a bit later than usual thanks to — you guessed it — COVID. Attackers are now combining these two topics to create spam campaigns, promising to provide you new information about how COVID affects your taxes, or even promising to send you a gift in exchange for receiving your COVID vaccine. Jaeson Schultz makes his inaugural appearance on Talos Takes to discuss what he’s seeing in the wild and how you can avoid these common scams.

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    Run Time: 00:13:18

    Keywords
    • scams
    • spam
    • COVID
    • tax day
    • email

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #50: Attackers are using Discord just as much as you are

    Cisco Talos recently discovered a wave of attackers spreading malware via collaboration apps like Discord and Slack. On this week’s episode of Talos Takes, Nick Biasini joins the show to bring us inside his research process for this post and discuss why these attacks have been so successful. Jon brings up his Dungeons & Dragons group, too, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

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    Run Time: 00:07:17

    Keywords
    • malware
    • Discord
    • spam

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #53: What can we learn from those air fryer vulnerabilities?

    Everyone had jokes when it came to the vulnerabilities we recently disclosed in a WiFi-connected air fryer. But there are actually some lessons to take away from this, such as: “Not everything needs to be connected to the internet.” Joe Marshall joins the show this week to discuss all things “smart” appliances, how to protect your network and the repercussions of these specific air fryer vulnerabilities.

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    Run Time: 00:11:00

    Keywords
    • IoT
    • ICS
    • vulnerabilities
    • patching

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #49: LodaRAT's connection to Android devices

    Chris Neal from Talos Outreach has followed LodaRAT for years now. It’s gone from a fairly small threat to a full-on malware with several features that target all sorts of Android devices. Chris joins the show this week to discuss his history of researching LodaRAT and updates us on its latest TTPs. Find out how this trojan tries to trick users into downloading it on their phones and how it hunts for your banking information.

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    Run Time: 00:06:05

    Keywords
    • malware
    • trojans
    • banking trojan
    • mobile malware
    • LodaRAT

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #48: The history of ObliqueRAT

    After researching and writing about ObliqueRAT for several months now, Asheer Malhotra joins Talos Takes for the first time to discuss this trojan. We’ve seen this malware evolve over the past year or so to ad new evasion techniques and find ways to avoid email filters and usual antivirus protections. Asheer talks about his history researching this malware and provides some advice on how to avoid email spam and the other maldocs these actors try to spread.

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    Run Time: 00:07:54

    Keywords
    • ObliqueRAT
    • malware
    • trojans
    • spam

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #45: Finding an alternative to SMS multi-factor authentication

    It was only a matter of time before we had Wendy Nather from Cisco Secure Duo on the show. We finally met Beers with Talos’ level of stardom, as Wendy joins the show to discuss SMS messages as a form of multi-factor authentication. We break down why SMS authentication is still around and used by some of our most important services like banks, and what alternatives are out there. We also discuss the dangers of SIM-jacking attacks and the benefits of using Duo’s app-based authentication.

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    Run Time: 00:08:30

    Keywords
    • MFA
    • SMS
    • 2FA
    • passwords

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #44: A super-sized edition for a roundtable discussion on SolarWinds

    Welcome to the first-ever XL edition of Talos Takes. This one is a little longer than usual, but we promise you it’s worth it. We recently brought together researchers from all corners of Talos to talk about what we know about SolarWinds so far, and what’s still to be discovered. Our various teams have spent the past several months diving deep into the SolarWinds supply chain attack, and this is a collection of Talos’ knowledge on the current situation. Talking points include whether it’s fair to refer to this campaign as “SolarWinds,” what other initial infection vectors there may be, the breadth of the attack and more boots-on-the-ground intelligence. If you want to watch the video version, head to our YouTube page.

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    Run Time: 00:34:50

    Keywords
    • SolarWinds
    • Incident Response
    • supply chain
    • news
    • Headlines

  • Talos Takes

    Talos Takes Ep. #43: Microsoft Exchange Server emergency show

    We put this week’s Talos Takes episode together last minute to discuss the Microsoft Exchange Server zero-day vulnerabilities Microsoft disclosed earlier this week. Nick Biasini joins the show to discuss mitigation strategies and what these vulnerabilities mean for your environment at-large. Plus, we discuss why this is another case of patching above all else. For more coverage on this topic, check out the Talos blog.

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    Run Time: 00:05:30

    Keywords
    • Microsoft
    • Exchange
    • vulnerabilities
    • CVEs
    • zero-day