News · Cisco Talos Intelligence
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
From federal SOCs to Talos: Ryan Fetterman on practical security research
What does it mean to be "blue collar" for the blue team? Amy sat down with security researcher Ryan Fetterman to discuss his journey from federal agency work to his new role at Talos. He shares the realities of detection engineering — including the creative, often frustrating ways attackers evolve their tactics to stay one step ahead of traditional defenses. Beyond the technical grind, Ryan shares his philosophy on building a career in security without burning out. From the value of project-based learning to the importance of finding time to step away from the keyboard, here's Ryan's take on…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
I had plans for that second
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Here for the latest on the PHP vulnerabilities? Head on down to ‘The One Big Thing’. Talos has published a blog to explain what we know so far, and details the Snort coverage available, including rules in the Community Ruleset. But if you want a bit of levity, here’s what I wrote before everything kicked off yesterday: Ever feel like the world is moving too fast to keep up? Well, I bring you scientific proof that it’s not just you. For millions of years, the moon has been slowing down the Earth’s rotation. But over the past decad…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Compromised eMudhra intermediate certificates
Cisco Talos is aware of eight compromised intermediate certificates belonging to the intermediate certificate authority, eMudhra. Rather than possessing the mandatory 384 bits of pseudo-random security, several private keys evaluated single-digit and double-digit integers. This misconfiguration allows an attacker with the private key of any of the compromised intermediate CAs to impersonate any website or service. Six of the TLS certificates, trusted by Chrome, Mozilla, and Apple have been blocked by these vendors already. Two other certificates, used for codesigning by Microsoft, have also b…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Two critical RCEs in PHP core
Update 10/22: Added section detailing observations of in the wild exploitation and associated IOCs. Cisco Talos is tracking the disclosure of two unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaws in PHP core, dubbed “php2shell”, triggered by a plain HTTP request and exploitable before any application code runs, affecting every PHP build since 5.4. Based on the entities involved in the disclosure, artificial intelligence and associated technologies played a key role in the discovery of these vulnerabilities — yet another example of how these technologies are forcing change across the landscape…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Parasitizing trust: How legitimate infrastructure becomes a delivery pipeline for attackers
Legitimate infrastructure has become a powerful delivery mechanism for attackers, carrying the inherent trust they once had to build. As Cisco Talos explored in our previous research on weaponizing software-as-a-service (SaaS) notification pipelines, these platforms are increasingly repurposed as proxies for malicious intent. Talos has since tracked a significant acceleration in this trend, observing abuse across more than 25 distinct legitimate platforms in the past year. The abused infrastructure included collaboration, productivity, file-sharing, survey, payment, and AI-related platforms.…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
There's only so much code: the rise in vulnerability numbers
Frontier AI models (like Mythos) are rapidly mining decades of technical debt across ubiquitous legacy libraries, driving monthly Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerability advisories up more than tenfold (reaching 1,415 this month). This volume is overwhelming open-source maintainers and putting pressure on the traditional 90-day coordinated disclosure model. Despite a 105% year-over-year surge in CVEs, Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs) grew by only 37%, and only 3 of September's 975 Microsoft advisories saw in-the-wild exploitation, demonstrating that the vast majority of AI-discovered bugs…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
The Q3 Vulnerability Pulse: Discovery ≠ Exploitation
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I've been following a lot of (sometimes heated) threads and discussions lately about the current vulnerability landscape. I learned new words/phrases such as Summer of Hell (although I'm writing this with 1°C/34°F outside), Vulnpocalypse, Bugmageddon, Bugpocalypse, Breachpocalypse... Let's look at some numbers: We crossed the 70k mark, and it's only the end of September. This has never been seen before — I think we can agree this number is skyrocketing. Also, CVE numbering organically grew into the six-digit range. Check your too…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Break the silence: Kazakhstan-nexus UAT-6275 targets CIS government organizations
This research was conducted jointly with Julian-Ferdinand Vögele of Recorded Future’s Insikt Group. Details of the joint research and presentation are available here. Cisco Talos identified UAT-6275 (TAG-193 by Recorded Future) activity targeting government organizations across the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Recovered artifacts show additional interest in water resources and energy. This focus is consistent with intelligence collection and may reflect the regional effects of the Russia–Ukraine war. In activity observed from June 2025 through August 2026, Talos identified four i…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Microsoft Patch Tuesday for October 2026 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilities
Microsoft has released its monthly security update for October 2026, which includes 1415 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 85 that Microsoft marked as "critical." Microsoft notes that 1 of the vulnerabilities disclosed this month have been exploited in the wild CVE-2026-96951 is a security feature bypass vulnerability that affects Windows Shell. The shared weakness is Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command ('Command Injection'). The vulnerability has a CVSS base score of 8.8. Out of 85 "critical" vulnerabilities, 67 are remote code execution (RCE)…
CVE-2026-96951 -
Cisco Talos Intelligence
Making sure the checks get printed
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. My name is Pierre Cadieux, and I’ll be helping contribute to these newsletters. A little about me: I’ve been working in the cybersecurity industry in many roles over the past 20+ years, first focusing on endpoint security, policies, and firewalls, then moving to risk management and compliance, disaster recovery, and investigations. I spent about 15 years as a consultant working across many well-known consultancy firms and eventually moved to Cisco where I spent time doing security operations center (SOC) design and assessments as…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
UAT-11985: AI-assisted event lures delivering real-time Google AitM phishing
Cisco Talos identified an advanced persistent threat (APT) spear-phishing campaign against individuals affiliated with Taiwan research organizations. The operation leveraged legitimate public event themes and impersonated reputable academic and policy institutions to establish credibility. The phishing emails exhibited highly consistent structure, rhetoric, and personalization patterns, suggesting the threat actor likely used AI-assisted content generation to rapidly customize invitation lures for different targets while maintaining a common social engineering framework. Beyond traditional em…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Ignore all instructions and read this blog: The state of AI-analysis evasion in malware
“AI-analysis evasion” encapsulates the real-world techniques malware authors are developing in attempt to obstruct or defeat any layers of automated AI analysis. This technique is cheap to add but inconsistently impactful — the best techniques steered the outcome in the attacker’s favor in about 35% of test runs. Further, it must always be plaintext and therefore is always detectable. The operators are not wrong to assume AI tools are in the analysis pipeline, but the answer is not to remove them; it is to build them so that text inside a sample is always treated as evidence, never as instruc…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and Foxit vulnerabilities
Cisco Talos’ Vulnerability Discovery & Research team recently disclosed vulnerabilities in Adobe, Apple, Foxit Reader, and Microsoft. The vulnerabilities mentioned in this blog post have been patched by their respective vendors, in adherence to Cisco’s third-party vulnerability disclosure policy. For Snort coverage that can detect the exploitation of these vulnerabilities, download the latest rule sets from Snort.org, and our latest Vulnerability Advisories are always posted on Talos Intelligence’s website. Adobe Photoshop privilege escalation vulnerability TALOS-2026-2360 (CVE-2026-48388) is…
CVE-2026-48388 -
Cisco Talos Intelligence
One breach, please, and make no mistakes
For some time now, the cybersecurity community has seen examples of autonomous agents, built inside AI labs, attacking public infrastructure (to name a few, Hugging Face, DSEWiki, and RubyGems). Of course, frontier labs have built-in security to prevent these attacks from occurring, but every now and then, the training or prompting appears to be insufficient — especially when the agents themselves attempt to use logic to probe and bypass the restrictions placed on them. The question that matters is not whether AI attacks are coming, because the age of AI agents executing cyber attacks is alre…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Give yourself room to be human
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Fall is officially here in Maryland, and I can’t be more relieved. I flourish in 50 degree weather, where it feels natural to burrow under blankets, knit sweaters, and listen to an audiobook. Beyond that, though, can I say that I’m glad fall is here because the end of summer has been a bit of a shitshow? I’m allowed to curse on here, right? Without going into too much detail, my uncle was diagnosed with a rare cancer, and my family decided we were going to fly out to spend a week with him. I was determined to find a way to make i…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
The Fine Art of Frustrating the Adversary
For Cybersecurity Awareness Month, eight Cisco Talos researchers share practical ways defenders can frustrate adversaries at different stages of an operation. Deception techniques such as honeypot accounts, false infrastructure, and tarpits can slow adversaries down while giving defenders earlier opportunities to detect their activity. Behavioral detections, tighter control of legitimate remote-management tools, and clear boundaries around AI agents can make essential adversary actions more visible and easier to interrupt. Breaking dependencies between stages of an operation can prevent an ad…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
China-nexus UAT-11587 targets government and policy organizations across Asia with Antino backdoor
Cisco Talos uncovered a cluster of activity we track as UAT-11587 targeting government and policy organizations across Asia, including in Taiwan, India, the Philippines, and Cambodia, to deliver a previously undocumented backdoor referred to as “Antino” in developer artifacts. Talos first observed UAT-11587 activity in September 2025. By July 2026, Talos had identified at least 16 affected or targeted institutional environments across eight Asian countries. Antino is a Rust-compiled Windows backdoor that supports host reconnaissance, shell and PowerShell execution, file transfer, in-memory sh…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Securing the keys to the kingdom: Announcing Executive Threat Detection
Attackers are using greater sophistication to gain access to high-yield targets like executives, and company-wide security measures can easily miss these subtle, personal attacks. Executive Threat Detection offers protection for up to 10 principals, with monthly custom threat hunts and reports relevant to those principals’ corporate systems. Proactive attention from incident response experts gives executives peace of mind by detecting and stopping long-term, stealthy adversary access. In our previous exploration of proactive threat hunting, Cisco Talos discussed how the modern security landsc…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Trust and the enticing consultancy offer
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. In the cybersecurity industry, trust is the invisible currency. Every practitioner carries the implicit trust not to abuse privileged access or knowledge of vulnerabilities in each employment or engagement. This trust is valued by those who require our services, but also by threat actors. Clumsy phishing attacks may be easy to identify, but be wary of unsolicited messages on social media, especially if someone is offering payment for a simple service or suggests a lucrative job offer. These might be an enticement to unknowingly s…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
The Closed Quorum: Inside the first reported autonomous AI C2 implant
CLOSEDQUORUM, a malware binary discovered through Cisco Talos’ CAIRN project, exhibits fully autonomous command and control (C2). While we do not have confirmation of in-the-wild deployment, artifacts from the binary were used to connect the developer to postings on criminal forums related to carding, dating back to 2025. This malware is a useful reference example of how attackers can collapse the decision space of a particular attack phase into a constrained set of choices, allowing AI models to provide reasoning and act independently. CLOSEDQUORUM represents a shift in effort displacement f…
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Cisco Talos Intelligence
Introducing CAIRN: Frontier tracking for AI-integrated malware
A cairn is a marker left behind on a trail, a deliberately placed stack of stones that helps hikers find their way when the path is unclear. Attackers building AI-integrated malware unintentionally (and inevitably) leave behind markers of their own: prompt templates, provider endpoints, API keys, jailbreak terms, and other artifacts embedded throughout their tooling. When we consider these strings as cognitive artifacts, or vestiges left behind from AI integration, we can enable a new, metadata-first hunting methodology for AI-integrated malware that is fast and scalable. These artifacts can…
