Angler Exploit Kit | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Hackers are always in search for an elite method to create loopholes in the cyberspace to implement the dark rules in the form of vulnerability exploitation. Top Trustworthy sites such as The New York Times , BBC , MSN , AOL and many more are on the verge of losing their face value as a malwertized advertisement campaign are looming around the websites, according to SpiderLabs. Here's what Happens to Users when Clicking Ads on these Big Brand Sites: The advertisements on the legit sites trick users into clicking on it, making them believe that these circulated ads come from a trusted networks. Once clicked, the malicious Ad redirects the user to a malicious website that hosts Angler Exploit Kit (AEK) to infect visitors by installing malware and ransomware on their computer. Angler Exploit Kit includes many malicious hacking tools and zero-day exploits that let hackers execute drive-by attacks on visitors' computers. In this case, the Angler kit scan...

You should be very careful while visiting websites on the Internet because you could be hit by a new upgrade to the World's worst Exploit Kit – Angler , which lets hackers develop and conduct their own drive-by attacks on visitors' computers with relative ease. Many poorly-secured websites are targeting Windows users with a new "Cocktail" of malware that steals users' passwords before locking them out from their machines for ransom. Yes, stealing Windows users' passwords before encrypting their data and locking their PCs for ransom makes this upgrade to the Angler Exploit Kit nastier. Here's How the New Threat Works: Once the Angler exploit kit finds a vulnerable application, such as Adobe Flash, in visitor's computer, the kit delivers its malicious payloads, according to a blog post published by Heimdal Security. The First Payload infects the victim's PC with a widely used data thief exploit known as Pony that systematic...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The world's infamous Angler Exploit Kit has become the most advanced, much more powerful and the best exploit kit available in the market, beating the infamous BlackHole exploit kit , with a host of exploits including zero-days and a new technique added to it. Angler Exploit Kit's newest technique is dubbed "Domain Shadowing" which is considered to be the next evolution of online crime. Domain Shadowing, first appeared in 2011, is the process of using users domain registration logins to create subdomains. WHAT IS DOMAIN SHADOWING ? With the help of Domain Shadowing technique used in a recent Angler campaign, attackers are stealing domain registrant credentials to create tens of thousands of sub-domains that are used in hit-and-run style attacks in order to either redirect victims to the attack sites, or serve them malicious payloads. Security researcher Nick Biasini of Cisco's Talos intelligence team analysed the campaign and said the "massive...

Adobe has rolled-out an urgent out-of-band update for a critical remote code-execution vulnerability in its popular Flash Player that is currently being exploited by hackers. The critical vulnerability ( CVE 2014-8439 ) in Flash Player for Windows, Mac and Linux was originally mitigated more than a month ago in October 14, 2014 patch release, but a French researcher Kafeine found its exploits in the Angler and Nuclear malware kits after Adobe released a patch, according to security vendor F-Secure. " The vulnerability is being exploited in blind mass attack. No doubt about it : the team behind Angler is really good at what it does ," Kafeine said in a blog post . The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code due to a weakness in the way a dereferenced pointer to memory is handled. An attacker could serve a specially crafted Flash file to trigger the vulnerability, which would lead to the execution of attacker's code in order to take control...

A New York-based online ad network company AppNexus, that provides a platform specializing in real-time online advertising, has again been spotted as the origin of a recent "malvertising" campaign that makes use of the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to malicious websites hosting the Asprox malware. AppNexus servers process 16 billion ad buys per day, making it the biggest reach on the open web after Google. Back in May, AppNexus was serving malicious ads targeting Microsoft's Silverlight platform. The world's largest Internet Video Subscription service Netflix runs on Silverlight, and because of its popularity, hackers have been loading exploit kits with Silverlight. As part of this campaign, users of several high-profile websites including Java.com, Deviantart.com, TMZ.com, Photobucket.com, IBTimes.com, eBay.ie, Kapaza.be and TVgids.nl , last week were redirected to websites serving malicious advertisements that infected visitors by installing botnet ma...

Netflix, the world's largest Internet Video Subscription service with more than 35.7 million customers in U.S alone, that runs on the Microsoft Silverlight platform, has now become a popular target for cybercriminals, as public awareness of Java and Flash flaws is increasing. Silverlight is a Microsoft's plug-in for streaming media on browsers, similar to Adobe Flash Player , that handles multimedia contents on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X Web Browsers, and is popularly known for being used in Netflix's streaming video service. But, Netflix isn't the only service that works on Silverlight, many other multimedia services supports Silverlight. Malware and Exploit Kit developers are targeting Silverlight users as they aren't aware of the increasing proliferation of malware for the platform. Silverlight vulnerabilities are mostly exploited using drive-by download attacks to compromise victim's computers with malware, especially through malicious ads. A recent...