Talos Threat Source is a regular intelligence update from Cisco Talos, highlighting the biggest threats each week and other security news.
Welcome to this week’s Threat Source newsletter — the perfect place to get caught up on all things Talos from the past week.
After a long week of conferences out in Las Vegas, we are back in the swing of things. Thanks to everyone who came and checked out the Cisco Security booth at Black Hat, B-Sides and DEFCON. If you have any photos from Vegas, tag us at either @TalosIntelligence or @Snort on Twitter and we’ll retweet your photos.
This week we have coverage for Microsoft Patch Tuesday. Microsoft, as part of its monthly update, fixed 62 vulnerabilities in a variety of its products. You can read about the most prevalent bugs here, and be sure to check the bottom of the post for the new Snort rules that we have to keep you safe.
Finally, we also have our weekly Threat Roundup, which you can find on the blog every Friday afternoon. There, we go over the most prominent threats we’ve seen (and blocked) over the past week.
If you want to see one of our researchers out and about, be sure to check below for upcoming public engagements where they will represent Talos.
Location: CactusCon, Mesa Convention Center in Mesa, Arizona
Synopsis: The rise of ransomware has paralleled a rise in the value of cryptocurrencies. The two are not necessarily connected, but the impact has been. From an adversary's perspective, there are two primary ways of getting these currencies: ransom payouts or mining. Cryptocurrency mining has been around as long as cryptocurrency, and it's always been a trade-off. Can you earn enough currency to offset the electricity and hardware costs? Well, imagine if you didn't have to worry about either of them. This talk will provide a deep dive into pool mining, and how it is being leveraged by attackers.
Location: Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Synopsis: Paul and Warren are hosting a joint talk on the Olympic Destroyer malware from earlier this year, and will cover why it is so difficult to attribute the attack. Vanja will also be hosting a workshop on manual kernel mode malware analysis.
Location: Texas Cyber Summit at Wyndham River Walk Hotel in San Antonio, Texas
Synopsis: Wiper malware has been leveraged by attackers for years to facilitate the destruction of data and systems. In many cases, this malware has caused widespread operational issues for organizations and critical infrastructure all over the globe. Attackers have increasingly been leveraging and improving upon their wiper malware over the past several years. This talk will cover several notable examples of wiper malware, how they were distributed and the impacts that resulted from these attacks.
Description: Microsoft fixed 62 vulnerabilities in a variety of its products as part of its monthly update. This month’s advisory addresses 20 bugs that are rated as “critical” and 28 that are rated “important.” The bugs exist in Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and several other products.
Description: Adobe has patched multiple vulnerabilities in its products, including Flash Player, Creative Cloud and Acrobat. Two of the bugs, located in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, are rated as “critical,” and could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a victim machine with the same privileges as the current user.
Description: There is a directory traversal vulnerability in CGit, a web frontend for Git repositories, identified as CVE-2018-14912. The vulnerability exists in the cgitcloneobjects function in CGit before version 1.2.1 when enable-http-clone=1 is not turned off.
Keep up with all things Talos by following us on Twitter and Facebook. You can also subscribe to the Beers with Talos podcast, which comes out bi-weekly, here (as well as on your favorite podcast app). And, if you’re not already, you can also subscribe to the weekly Threat Source newsletter here.