redirection

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 […]

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.