malvertising

September 22, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: “Kyle and Stan” Malvertising Network 9 Times Larger Than Expected

3 min read

This post was authored by Armin Pelkmann. On September 8th, Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group unveiled the existence of the “Kyle and Stan” Malvertisement Network. The network was responsible for placing malicious advertisements on big websites like amazon.com, ads.yahoo.com, www.winrar.com, youtube.com and 70 other domains. As it turns out, this was just the tip of the iceberg. Ongoing research now reveals […]

September 8, 2014

THREAT RESEARCH

Threat Spotlight: “Kyle and Stan” Malvertising Network Threatens Windows and Mac Users With Mutating Malware

9 min read

This post was authored by Shaun Hurley, David McDaniel and Armin Pelkmann. Update 2014-09-22: Updates on this threat can be found here Have you visited amazon.com, ads.yahoo.com, www.winrar.com, youtube.com, or any of the 74 domains listed below lately? If the answer is yes, then you may have been a victim to the “Kyle and Stan” […]

May 19, 2014

SECURITY

Angling for Silverlight Exploits

6 min read

This post is co-authored by Andrew Tsonchev, Jaeson Schultz, Alex Chiu, Seth Hanford, Craig Williams, Steven Poulson, and Joel Esler. Special thanks to co-author Brandon Stultz for the exploit reverse engineering.  Silverlight exploits are the drive-by flavor of the month. Exploit Kit (EK) owners are adding Silverlight to their update releases, and since April 23rd we have […]

April 15, 2014

SECURITY

Year-Long Exploit Pack Traffic Campaign Surges After Leveraging CDN

7 min read

Anyone can purchase an exploit pack (EP) license or rent time on an existing EP server. The challenge for threat actors is to redirect unsuspecting web browsing victims by force to the exploit landing page with sustained frequency. Naturally, like most criminal services in the underground, the dark art of traffic generation is a niche specialty that must be purchased to ensure drive-by campaign success. For the past year we have been tracking a threat actor (group) that compromises legitimate websites and redirects victims to EP landing pages. Over the past three months we observed the same actor using malvertising - leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs) to facilitate increased victim redirection - as part of larger exploit pack campaigns.