Malware Word Search: Identifying Angler's Dictionary
Summary: Cisco Talos observed Angler exploit kit landing-page URLs change drastically on March 8, rotating through several URL structures on a single proxy server within 20 minutes before settling on a format of /topic/ followed by a five-digit number and eight hyphen-separated words. After extracting thousands of unique words from the URLs, including obscure ones such as epigrammatic, atropine and umbrageous, Talos concluded that corncob.dict is a likely source because all observed words appear in it and its word-length and starting-letter distributions were the closest match.
Key Takeaway: Angler rebuilt its entire URL scheme in about 20 minutes without taking the proxy server down, and Talos released updated rule 38228 in response - a reminder that detection signatures keyed to a fixed URL pattern can go stale within a single morning.
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