Cyber Risks · Cisco Talos

Defeating Future Threats Starts Today

Summary: Cisco Talos reports that spammers increased their use of hidden text and formatting tricks to disguise content from anti-spam parsers during the second half of 2024, and that its quarterly trends report for October to December 2024 found threat actors increasingly deploying web shells against vulnerable or unpatched public-facing applications for initial access. The newsletter also notes an undersea telecommunications cable in the Baltic was cut, three members of Russia's GRU were sanctioned over suspected cyber attacks against Estonia in 2020, and an infected IoT botnet powered the largest DDoS attack to date.

Why it matters: Talos frames content obfuscation that hides text from machine analysis as a likely growing attack vector against AI systems, and the same quarter saw attackers shift to web shells on unpatched public-facing applications - two exposures that sit in front of the systems your team is now being asked to defend.

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Topics
Threat Actors & Nation-State
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