Exploit kits: winter 2019 review

Active malvertising campaigns in December and the new year have kept exploit kit activity from hibernating in winter 2019. We mostly observed Fallout and RIG with the occasional, limited GrandSoft appearance for wider geo-targeting. In addition, narrowly-focused exploit kits such as Magnitude,...

Fallout EK Retools for a Fresh New 2019 Look

A new version of the Fallout exploit kit EK has emerged, featuring new exploits and fresh payloads, including the GandCrab ransomware. The development shows that EKs have a lot of life yet left in them, researchers say. The Fallout EK generally finds its victims by way of malvertising campaigns,...

Exploit kits: fall 2018 review

Exploit kit EK activity continues to surprise us as the weather cools, the leaves change, and we move into the fall of 2018. Indeed, shortly after our summer review, a new exploit kit was discovered, and while no new vulnerabilities were added to the current EKs, several malvertising chains are...

This Week in Security News: Hijacks and Healthcare

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, Singapore looks into the effectiveness of virtual browsers in an attempt to reduce cyberattacks on healthcare systems. Also, cybercriminals...

Exploit kits: summer 2018 review

The uptick trend in cybercriminals using exploit kits that we first noticed in our spring 2018 report has continued into the summer. Indeed, not only have new kits been found, but older ones are still showing signs of life. This has made the summer quarter one of the busiest we've seen for exploi...

Kronos Banking Trojan Surfaces After Years of Silence

The Kronos banking trojan is back from the malware dustbin. After years of lying dormant, hackers have reworked the underlying code and are actively targeting victims in Germany, Japan and Poland. The latest variant has incorporated a new command-and-control feature designed to work with the Tor...

ThreatList: Exploit Kits Still a Top Web-based Threat

What we can glean from a 2018 roundup of current web-threats is old vulnerabilities die hard. In a report, released by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, researchers said so far this year cybercriminals are targeting unpatched PCs with ancient CVEs and well-known exploit kits. Here is a ThreatList from...

RIG Exploit Kit Delivering Monero Miner Via PROPagate Injection Technique

Introduction Through FireEye Dynamic Threat Intelligence DTI, we observed RIG Exploit Kit EK delivering a dropper that leverages the PROPagate injection technique to inject code that downloads and executes a Monero miner similar activity has been reported by Trend Micro. Apart from leveraging a...

Exploit kits: Spring 2018 review

Since our last report on exploit kits, there have been some new developments with the wider adoption of the February Flash zero-day, as well as the inclusion of a new exploit for Internet Explorer. We have not seen that many changes in the drive-by landscape for a long time, although these are th...

RIG EK Still Makes Waves, This Time with a Stealthy Backdoor

Exploit kit activity has been declining since the latter half of 2016, but the RIG EK seems to buck the trend. It’s been involved in ongoing activity involving a wide range of crimeware payloads; and the latest campaign saw RIG dropping the Grobios malware, which is tailored to be a really stealt...

A Deep Dive Into RIG Exploit Kit Delivering Grobios Trojan

As discussed in previous blogs, exploit kit activity has been on the decline since the latter half of 2016. However, we do still periodically observe significant developments in this space, and we have been observing interesting ongoing activity involving RIG Exploit Kit EK. Although the volume o...

RIG Exploit Kit URL

RIG exploit kit is a web exploit kit that operates by delivering malicious payload to the victim's computer. Successful infection will allow the attacker to download additional malware to the target...

Exploit kits: Winter 2018 review

In the past, we used to do a blog series on exploit kits where we would periodically check in on the main players in the market. In March 2017, we wrote the Winter 2017 review, before exploit kit activity dropped down to a whisper. We've since discontinued our blog series, for lack of development...

Week in security (February 26 – March 4)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we explained how to protect your computer from malicious cryptomining, we gave an encryption 101 lesson using ShiOne ransomware as a case study, and we offered an explanation about SQL injection. We also released a report on the state of malicious cryptomining from...

RIG malvertising campaign uses cryptocurrency theme as decoy

For a couple of weeks, we have been observing a malvertising campaign that uses decoy websites to redirect users to the RIG exploit kit. Those sites, whose theme is about cryptocurrencies, were all registered recently and are swapped after a few days of use. The initial redirection starts off fro...

GandCrab ransomware distributed by RIG and GrandSoft exploit kits (updated)

This post was authored by Vasilios Hioueras and Jérôme Segura Update 2018-02-02: GandCrab is delivered via Necurs malicious spam 1. Update 2018-02-01: GandCrab is now also spread via the EITest campaign 2 3. - - Late last week saw the appearance of a new ransomware called GandCrab. Surprisingly, ...

A coin miner with a “Heaven’s Gate”

You might call the last two years the years of ransomware. Ransomware was, without a doubt, the most popular type of malware. But at the end of last year, we started observing that ransomware was losing its popularity to coin miners. It is very much possible that this trend will grow as 2018...

A week in security (January 8 – January 14)

It's very early in the year, yet everyone has already had a complete meltdown pun intended over a number of serious vulnerabilities found in legacy and modern microprocessors. Last week, rightly so, vendors released patches for hardware and OSes to help mitigate these threats. However, problems i...

RIG exploit kit campaign gets deep into crypto craze

There isn't a day that goes by without a headline about yet another massive spike in Bitcoin valuation, or a story about someone mortgaging their house to purchase the hardware required to become a serious cryptocurrency miner. If many folks are thinking about joining the 'crypto craze' movement,...

A week in security (December 04 – December 10)

Last week on the blog, we looked at a RIG EK malware campaign, explored how children are being tangled up in money mule antics, took a walk through the world of Blockchain, and gave a rundown of what's involved when securing web applications. We also laid out the trials and tribulations of the...