Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Personalized Exploit Kit Targets Researchers

Summary: A Twitter account named "Paunchbighecker," created on July 30, 2013, messaged security researchers including Mikko Hypponen, Kafeine, tachion24 and Krebs himself with a link to what appeared to be a Nuclear Pack exploit kit administrative panel. The page was a fake statistics panel with active Java exploits embedded in it, and a Virustotal analysis showed the kit pushing the ZeuS Trojan, though researcher Kafeine later said he believed it was an intentional leak of badguy credentials rather than an attack on researchers.

What you should know: The target list was the researchers themselves, and the bait was a fake exploit-kit panel built to look like a sloppy criminal's mistake - the same trick Brett Stone-Gross documented in a 2010 ZeuS attack, which means the people you rely on to identify threats are themselves a phishing surface.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
Related