Exploit Kits: Winter 2017 Review

A few months have passed since our Fall 2016 review of the most common exploit kits in our telemetry and honeypots.  Since then, there haven’t been any major changes. Exploit kit-related infections remain low compared to those via malicious spam. This is in part due to the lack of fresh and reliable exploits in today’s drive-by landscape.

Pseudo-Darkleech and EITest are the most popular redirection campaigns from compromised websites. They refer to code that is injected into – for the most part – WordPress, Joomla and Drupal websites, and automatically redirects visitors to an exploit kit landing page.

Malvertising campaigns keep fueling redirections to exploit kits as well, but can greatly vary in size and impact. The daily malverts from shady ad networks continue unchanged, while the larger attacks going after top ad networks and publishers come in waves.

In the following video, we do a quick overview of those exploit kits; if you are interested in the more technical details please visit Malwarebytes Labs for additional information on each of them.