heads up on a stenographic ad attack

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morganism
Senior Member
Posts: 134
Joined: Tue Nov 26, 2013 9:44 pm

heads up on a stenographic ad attack

Post by morganism »

"Millions of readers who visited popular news websites have been targeted by a series of malicious ads redirecting to an exploit kit exploiting several Flash vulnerabilities."

"Using the known Internet Explorer vulnerability CVE-2016-0162, the encoded script attempts to verify that it is not being run in a monitored environment such as a malware analyst’s machine.

”If the script does not detect any signs of monitoring, it redirects to the Stegano exploit kit’s landing page, via the TinyURL service. The landing page loads a Flash file that is able to exploit three different vulnerabilities (CVE-2015-8651, CVE-2016-1019, CVE-2016-4117), depending on the version of Flash found on the victim’s system."

http://www.welivesecurity.com/2016/12/0 ... cious-ads/

checks for IE and old Java installs
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Thrawn
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Re: heads up on a stenographic ad attack

Post by Thrawn »

Basically the only novel aspect of this is the concealment of the payload using steganography. The threat vector - scripts from a domain that cannot be trusted - is unchanged.

From the perspective of a research lab trying to study the attack, it's important, but from the perspective of an end-user trying to defend against it, it's the same as any other malvertising.

(In fact, it's theoretically slightly easier to block, because blocking scripts or images will stop this one. I actually do sometimes allow scripts while blocking images, on my mobile.)
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Thrawn
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Religion is not the opium of the masses. Daily life is the opium of the masses.

True religion, which dares to acknowledge death and challenge the way we live, is an attempt to wake up.
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