A malvertising campaign leveraged a fake Blockchain advertisement to expose users to the new Capesand exploit kit.

In October, Trend Micro discovered a malvertising campaign that presented users with a fake blog post discussing blockchain. This page, which attackers had actually copied using the HTTrack website copying tool, contained a hidden iframe that loaded the RIG exploit kit. The threat searched for vulnerabilities that it could exploit to distribute samples of DarkRAT and njRAT malware.

Over the next few weeks, however, researchers observed the iframe changed to load landing.php, which led to their discovery of Capesand hosted on the same server. Their analysis revealed that the new exploit kit was capable of abusing newer vulnerabilities like CVE-2018-4878 (an Adobe Flash Player flaw) as well as CVE-2018-8174 and CVE-2019-0752 (both affecting Microsoft Internet Explorer). They also uncovered that Capesand’s source code didn’t include the actual exploits, thereby necessitating that the exploit kit send a request to the API of its server to receive an exploit payload.

More Exploit Kits Uncovered

Capesand isn’t the only exploit kit that researchers have recently discovered. Back in June 2019, Cisco Talos analyzed an attack campaign that used a compromised business-to-business site to deliver the new Spelevo exploit kit.

Just a few months later, Trustwave uncovered a landing page for the previously undocumented Lord exploit kit, which used a script to collect several pieces of information about a visitor’s computer including their IP address, city of residence and Flash Player version, if any.

How to Defend Against RIG, Capesand and Others

Security professionals can help their organizations defend against RIG, Capesand and other exploit kits by using security information and event management (SIEM) data to learn the context of services affected by certain software vulnerabilities. As part of a larger comprehensive vulnerability management program, companies should also prioritize vulnerabilities so they can create a patching schedule that aligns with their organization’s needs and risks.