Talos Takes

There are so many options now for basic web browsing. There are ad-blocking plugins, privacy browsers, incognito mode, password managers — but for the average user, this can be a lot to keep up with. In this episode of Talos Takes, we dissect all these options and talk about what your best options are to keep your information safe while doing some everyday web browsing.

This week’s Talos Takes episode is another malware deep dive. Edmund Brumaghin joins the show to talk about WastedLocker, a recent ransomware family he and some other Talos researchers reverse-engineered. Here’s everything you need to know about what makes this threat unique and how it uses LoLBins to survive.

Honeypots are an important part of threat research and detection. In this episode of Talos Takes, we talk to Christopher Evans, who is our resident honeypot expert at Talos. Chris talks about how he uses them every day, why they’re important to Talos’ overall mission and balancing the use of them with the potential for making attackers smarter.

LoLBins sound like they’d be funny, but they’re anything but. These “living-off-the-land binaries” make it so that attackers can more easily hide on your system as they disguise themselves as legitimate processes. On this episode of Talos Takes, Nick Biasini talks about what LoLBins are, exactly, how adversaries use them and how you can spot them on your environment.

This week’s episode is actually an excerpt from our recently released roundtable on disinformation and American election security. This is a small part of our larger discussion on fake news, state-sponsored actors using fake social media accounts, and what can be done to combat the spread of disinformation. To see the whole thing, click here.

The quick and dirty beginner’s guide to what Snort is and how to use. This the podcast accompaniment to the rest of our Snort 101 materials, which can be found on Snort.org/Resources.

The dark web sounds scary — and it is. But what exactly does this dark web consist of? Despite what the name may suggest, it’s actually not people selling organs or stolen video games that happened to fall off the back of a truck. But what is actually on these forums? Azim Khodjibaev joins Jon Munshaw this week to discuss his experience with the dark web.

We use the term “APT” in cyber security a lot. But what does it mean, exactly? Does a group have to break a certain threshold to become an APT? Does the term refer to a specific malware family or a group of actors? On this week’s Talos Takes, Jon Munshaw talks to Azim from Talos’ Threat Intelligence team about this very topic.

Everyone is meeting virtually now. Whether it be important business or the average happy hour with friends and family, there’s no shortage of invites to chat rooms, presentations and software you’ve never heard of before you started working from home. And, of course, this software comes with its own set of security concerns and vulnerabilities. So Matt Valites joins Jon Munshaw this week to talk about the basics of securing your next friendly meetup or presentation to the board.

The value of cryptocurrencies is nowhere near where it was just two years ago. So does that mean cryptominers have gone away as a threat? Jon Munshaw and Nick Biasini sit down in this episode of Talos Takes to discuss where cryptominers stand in 2020. Why aren’t we reading about them as much? And why is being hit with one a sign of worse things to come?