Researchers witness surge in malvertising attacks pushing Magnitude exploit kit

Researchers at Malwarebytes have witnessed surge in malvertising attacks pushing the Magnitude exploit kit to drop CryptoWall ransomware on compromised machines.

In a blog post , Malwarebytes said, “During the past few days we have noticed a higher than usual number of malvertising attacks pushing the Magnitude exploit kit – which had been relatively quiet – to drop ransomware.”

CryptoWall was dropped via two separate malware binaries, the company informed.

Magnitude exploit kit is one of those exploit kits we don’t hear about as much in comparison to others such as Angler exploit kit or Nuclear exploit kit, the researchers claimed.

“Its unique URL pattern makes it easy to spot from the clutter of network traffic captures because it uses chained subdomains typically ending in a shady Top Level Domain like pw (Palau Pacific island),” Malwarebytes added.

Perhaps this increased activity is due to the fact that Magnitude exploit kit is the third exploit kit to leverage the latest Flash Player vulnerability (CVE-2015-7645) recently patched by Adobe.