Talos Takes
Every two weeks, host Amy Ciminnisi brings on a new guest from Talos or the broader Cisco Security world to break down a complicated security topic. We cover everything from breaking news to attacker trends and emerging threats.
Episodes
243 episodes
What's new with CVSS 4.0, and does it really change anything?
We're talking about vulnerabilities this week with Jerry Gamblin from Cisco Vulnerability Management. Jerry joins the show to talk about the re...
XL Edition: Talos' 2023 Year in Review
In this special edition of the show, we're bringing you the audio version of our Year in Review livestream. Recorded at the end of December, this stream included Hazel Burton, Nick Biasini and Laurie Varner from Cisco Talos Incident Response re...
Year in Review: Why are attackers targeting the telecommunications sector so often?
We're back from holiday break with the first new Talos Takes episode of 2024! We're continuing our dive into Talos' Year in Review report with Lexi DiSchola, one of the many ...
Year in Review: Why was 2023 the year of data theft extortion?
Jon apologizes for how he sounds in this episode, he was having mic troubles we discovered only during post-production. But outside of that, we continue the series of episodes re...
2023 Year in Review: Everything you need to know about Chinese state-sponsored actors
To celebrate the launch of our 2023 Year in Review report, we're doing a series of episodes highlighting several of our key takeaways from the past year. First up, we have Da...
Inside Talos' effort to protect the Ukrainian power grid
Joe Marshall, a central figure in the story of how Cisco Talos and other teams within Cisco worked together to protect the Ukrainian power grid, joins the show this week. He recaps a
Why has the Phobos ransomware been working for so long?
Guilherme Venere from Talos Outreach joins the show this week to talk about his research into the 8Base threat actor and its use of a variant of the Phobos ransomware. He recently published several works on the many variants of Phobos that exis...
A warning about scams in "Roblox" (or any other online game, really)
Tiago Pereira from Talos Outreach joins the program this week to talk about his research into the different types of scams that appear in the online game "Roblox." Many unde...
XL Edition: The top incident response trends of Q3
This week is a special edition of Talos Takes. We have the audio version of Talos Incident Response's recent On Air stream, where they discussed the top attacker trends they're seei...
Patching 101
Jerry Gamblin from Cisco Kenna joins this week's episode to talk about all things patching. If you're the average user, you probably don't think about patching much because many of them happen automatically in the background. However many admin...
What happens when you actually click the "report spam" button?
Everyone is tired of getting spam emails at this point, and it can feel exhausting always to click that "report spam" button just to get another phony email a few hours later. But we're here to assure you that
How to find the right password management solution for you
To continue our Cybersecurity Awareness Month series, Harpreet Singh from Talos Incident Response joins Jon to talk about password managers. They discuss the upside of using a third-party service like 1Password or LastPass, the potential danger...
Cybersecurity Awareness Month: The best practices for implementing multi-factor authentication
All of October, we'll be covering broad security-related topics for Cybersecurity Awareness Month. First up, we address the basics of implementing MFA in any environment, why any type of MFA is better than no MFA, the pitfalls of certain types ...
Inside a Talos Incident Response emergency event
Hazel Burton takes over as guest host for this episode as she talks to Nate Pors from Cisco Talos Incident Response. Nate was part of Talos IR's team that helped Veradigm, a healthcare technology company, prevent a Qakbot ransomware attack. Nat...
How Talos helped defend Black Hat's network in Vegas
What happens when the hackers become the hacked? Black Hat is one of the largest cybersecurity conferences in the world, and Talos had a hand in defending the on-site network for the past few years. Yuri Kramarz from Talos Incident Response wor...
SapphireStealer hits the open internet
Cisco Talos has recently written about malware families that go open-source, sometimes of their own volition, and
You're never going to believe this, but Lazarus Group is back again
North Korea's infamous APT group is back on the scene, this time with two new remote access trojans. By now, you've probably heard of Lazarus Group and all the annoying thi...
Carrying out incident response in-person vs. virtually
Everything about the modern workplace is different now from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many companies are embracing the remote work lifestyle, while others are stuck in a hybrid model or pushing employees to come back to the office. Wi...
Hacktivism is quietly growing, especially when it comes to Russia's invasion of Ukraine
The stereotypical "hacker" who looks to do good in the world probably involves a Guy Fawkes mask and black hoodie. But hacktivism has become much more than that, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine. On the heels of a
What's the difference between data theft extortion and ransomware?
Cisco Talos Incident Response observed data theft extortion more than any other type of cyber attack last quarter. So why has it become so popular? And what make...
Reading 2023's cybersecurity tarot cards
Hazel Burton and Jon Munshaw use this week to look back on the top threats and cybersecurity trends so far in 2023 and the rest of the year. Hazel recently compiled Talos' H...
(XL Edition): The top trends that Talos IR saw last quarter
We're back with the audio version of our quarterly Cisco Talos Incident Response On Air stream. Join the Talos IR team as they recap the past quarter's top trends
ISO 27002 sounds intimidating, but really it's just a cybersecurity shopping list
When Martin Lee first told Jon about ISO 27001 and 27002, Jon had to immediately Google whatever this combination of letters and numbers mean...