Malvertising campaign hits 10 million users in 10 days

Security Firm Cyphort Labs reported that 10 million users may have been infected in ten days by a malvertising and exploit kit campaign.

Nick Bilogorskiy, a security researcher at Cyphort  revealed that 10 million users may have been infected in ten days due to a malvertising and exploit kit campaign. According to the expert threat actors behind the malvertising campaign used the popular Angler exploit kit to compromise million computers worldwide.

The campaign dates back to at least 11 July, the experts observed several infections across Asia, the US, and in some European countries.

“In the last 10 days, Cyphort Labs found many more infected domains – they are listed below. Please refrain going to these sites as they are dangerous. 
We have notified e-planning.net about this issue and they are actively working to resolve it. At least 10 million people have visited these websites and were potentially exposed to the Angler exploit kit in the last 10 days according to our estimates and data from SimilarWeb.” states the post published by the company.

As usually happens in malvertising campaigns, the attackers used to compromise websites with a large number of visitors, in this case among the websites exploited by hackers to spread the malware there were the Japanese branch of The Huffington Post, Magna entityreadms.com, and the Indonesian paper bisnis.com. Below the complete list of compromised domains.

7/16/2015 www.zeldadungeon.net USA 1.1 Million visits per month
7/16/2015 www.mpora.com India 0.6 Million visits per month
7/17/2015 www.tvjaa.com Thailand 2.8 Million visits per month
7/19/2015 www.techz.vn Vietnam 3.7 Million visits per month
7/19/2015 www.hello-pet.com Indonesia 3.6 Million visits per month
7/22/2015 www.kienthuc.net.vn Vietnam 7.2 Million visits per month
7/23/2015 www.hochi.co.jp Japan 1.8 Million visits per month
7/23/2015 www.lavishcar.com USA 0.9 Million visits per month
7/25/2015 www.yaoiotaku.com USA 0.3 Million visits per month
7/25/2015 www.360kpop.com Vietnam 0.6 Million visits per month
7/25/2015 www.piovegovernoladro.info Italy 0.6 Million visits per month
7/25/2015 www.undertexter.se Sweden 0.3 Million visits per month
7/26/2015 www.zougla.gr Greece 4.4 Million visits per month
7/26/2015 www.sonicch.com Japan 1.1 Million visits per month
7/27/2015 www.skypech.com Japan 0.5 Million visits per month
7/27/2015 www.databazeknih.cz Czech Republic 0.7 Million visits per month

“All of these appear to be top popular websites in various countries including Vietnam, Turkey, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Germany.”

Bilogorskiy confirmed that Cyphort Labs has advised the companies affected by the malvertising campaign, including Microsoft Azure, and the ad platforms E-Planning.net and adtech.de.

The experts at Cyphort Labs noticed that cyber criminals adopted any precaution to avoid to raise suspicion, including the use of multiple SSL redirectors to encrypt traffic.

Below an example of redirection chain adopted for this campaign.

1 start www.zeldadungeon.net
2 malvert ads.us.e-planning.net
3_SSL_redirect ert-fr3-54.azurewebsites.net
4_SSL_redirect abcmenorca.net
5 abzercdpeab.alver.miefifreetechbooks.net
6 abzercdpeab.lojad.gahwethats.net
7 Angler defis.uloozkolozzeum.net/viewtopic.php?<malware>

Malvertising campaigns are very insidious, in June security experts noticed a spike in the malicious activity, hackers served malicious ads on popular sites including The Drudge Report, CBS Sports, the PerezHilton magazine, Yahoo, Verizon FiOS, and eBay UK.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Malvertising,  cybercrime)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

Recent Posts

Google: China dominates government exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2023

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant reported a surge in the number of actively…

4 hours ago

Google addressed 2 Chrome zero-days demonstrated at Pwn2Own 2024

Google addressed two zero-day vulnerabilities in the Chrome web browser that have been demonstrated during…

16 hours ago

INC Ransom stole 3TB of data from the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland

The INC Ransom extortion group hacked the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland and is threatening…

20 hours ago

CISA adds Microsoft SharePoint bug disclosed at Pwn2Own to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds a Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability disclosed at the…

1 day ago

The DDR Advantage: Real-Time Data Defense

This is the advantage of Data Detection and Response (DDR) for organizations aiming to build…

1 day ago

Finnish police linked APT31 to the 2021 parliament attack

The Finnish Police attributed the attack against the parliament that occurred in March 2021 to…

1 day ago

This website uses cookies.