This year has seen a big shift in the exploit kit landscape, with many of the bigger players unexpectedly dropping out of action. The Nuclear exploit kit operations started dwindling in May, Angler disappeared around the same time Russia’s Federal Security Service made nearly 50 arrests last June, and then in September Neutrino reportedly went private and shifted focus to select clientele only. Now, the most prominent exploit kits in circulation are RIG and Sundown. Both gained prominence shortly after Neutrino dropped out of active circulation.
Read MoreIn the first part of this series of blog posts, we discussed what new developments and changes in the exploit kit landscape were seen in 2015. In this post, we look at the scale of the exploit kit problem – how many users were affected, which exploit kits are popular, and where are the users coming from?
Read MoreThreats never stand still, and exploits kits were no exception. 2015 saw multiple changes to this part of the threat landscape: freshly-discovered exploits were added, and compromised websites and malvertising were used to deploy and spread threats using exploit kits. Exploit kits were a key part of the threat landscape in 2015. In this series of posts,…
Read MoreBy Brooks Li, Stanley Liu and Allen Wu Feedback from the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ has allowed us to discover that the notorious Angler and Nuclear exploit kits have included the latest Flash vulnerability (CVE-2015-5560) in their regular update. This means that systems with Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.209 and earlier are vulnerable; however users running the…
Read MoreThe dissection of the data from the Hacking Team leak has yielded another critical discovery: Hacking Team uses a UEFI BIOS rootkit to keep their Remote Control System (RCS) agent installed in their targets’ systems. This means that even if the user formats the hard disk, reinstalls the OS, and even buys a new hard…
Read More