Security researchers discovered a new malvertising campaign launched by the Domen social engineering toolkit.

On February 19, Malwarebytes discovered a new malvertising campaign leveraging a VPN service as a lure. The campaign featured a host of domains that were new to Domen’s attack infrastructure. These included search-one[.]info as its fraudulent page, mix-world[.]best as its download site and panel-admin[.]best as its backend panel.

Ultimately, the campaign leveraged a series of redirects to expose users to Smoke Loader. In one attack instance detected by Malwarebytes’ researchers, this malicious downloader installed numerous secondary payloads. Those payloads included the IntelRapid cryptominer, a Vidar stealer and Buran ransomware.

This wasn’t the first campaign to feature some of those payloads together. For instance, Cybereason discovered an attack campaign that drew from various accounts in Bitbucket, a code repository platform, to load IntelRapid and Vidar along with the AZORult Trojan, STOP ransomware and other payloads.

A Look Back at Domen’s Recent Activity

Malwarebytes first reported on Domen’s malvertising activity in September 2019. At the time of its analysis, the security firm observed the social engineering toolkit using compromised websites to trick visitors into clicking on a fake Adobe Flash Player update. Clicking on the “Update” button caused the campaign to download “download.hta.” This script then used PowerShell to connect to xyxyxyxyxy[.]xyz and download the NetSupport remote-access Trojan (RAT) as its malware payload.

Even so, Domen didn’t first awaken in the fall of 2019. Malwarebytes confirmed this when it found an ad for the toolkit that malicious actors had posted on a black hat forum back in April of that year.

How to Defend Against a Malvertising Campaign

Security professionals can help their organizations defend against malvertising campaigns by staying on top of patch management. While not evident in the Domen operations described above, many other malvertising campaigns commonly use exploit kits as a means of distributing their malware payloads. Additionally, infosec personnel should invest in a unified endpoint management (UEM) solution to grant visibility into all their endpoints. Doing so will help teams quickly detect and remediate an infection from an attack campaign’s malware payload.