While avoiding the use of Flash is good advice for helping to fend off exploit kits, some of the vulnerabilities exploited by these kits actually target the browsers themselves. An important example of this is CVE-2016-0189, which affects
Microsoft
‘s
Internet Explorer
browser versions 9 through 11.
First discovered
in the wild
in targeted attacks in South Korea, the vulnerability was
patched
by
Microsoft
in May 2016 and started being
used in exploit kits
not long thereafter. It proved to be one of the
most popular
vulnerabilities for exploit kits in 2016.
Today, we publish a paper (
HTML
and
PDF
) by
FireEye
researchers Ankit Anubhav and Manish Sardiwal, who thoroughly analyse this ‘God Mode’ vulnerability and explain what made it so popular in the cybercriminal ecosystem. Though this particular vulnerability may be on its last legs, it provides some important lessons, not just technically but also when it comes to understanding cybercrime.
If you have some research you’d like to share with the security community, we’d love to hear from you. Why not submit a paper for
publication in Virus Bulletin
or submit a
proposal for VB2017
.
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