![]() The clues suggest that Hutchins began developing and selling malware in his mid-teens - only to later develop a change of heart and earnestly endeavor to leave that part of his life squarely in the rearview mirror. In this post, I will attempt to describe and illustrate more than three weeks’ worth of connecting the dots from what appear to be Hutchins’ earliest hacker forum accounts to his real-life identity. But as I began to dig deeper into the history tied to dozens of hacker forum pseudonyms, email addresses and domains he apparently used over the past decade, a very different picture began to emerge. To date, some 226 supporters have donated more than $14,000 to his defense fund.Īt first, I did not believe the charges against Hutchins would hold up under scrutiny. They reasoned that the government was overstepping on flimsy evidence, noting that Hutchins has worked tirelessly to expose cybercriminals and their malicious tools. When this fact became more widely known - combined with his hero status for halting Wannacry - a great many MalwareTech readers quickly leapt to his defense to denounce his arrest. Relatively few knew it before his arrest, but Hutchins for many years authored the popular cybersecurity blog MalwareTech. Hutchins was virtually unknown to most in the security community until May 2017, when a British newspaper revealed him as the “accidental hero” who inadvertently halted the global spread of WannaCry, a ransomware contagion that had taken the world by storm just days before. resident Marcus Hutchins on suspicion of authoring and/or selling “Kronos,” a strain of malware designed to steal online banking credentials. Other exploit kits are available, but these may not have the support structure that Paunch was able to build with BHEK.In early August 2017, FBI agents in Las Vegas arrested 23-year-old U.K. The Blackhole Exploit Kit is basically a web-based application that can exploit web browser vulnerabilities as users visit infected websites. Any malware infection which comes from use of the Blackhole Exploit Kit must be assumed to be for the purpose of stealing passwords, financial information, and other personal data. "In the long term, the impact of BHEK's apparent demise remains somewhat unclear. There are no technical details available from Microsoft for this exploit either. It had also been rumoured that he could trade a jail sentence in return for work inside Russia's security service, the FSB. ![]() In particular, users who purchased BHEK directly from Paunch or his authorized resellers would be in Paunch's database of clients, which is now presumably in the hands of law enforcement," said Trend researcher, Jonathan Leopando. "One particular area of concern in Russian underground forums is whether users of BHEK could face arrests themselves. Īccording to the firm, the long-term consequences of Paunch's arrest could go far beyond the disappearance of one of the crimeware industry's most successful ever distribution systems. Trend Micro has also reported the complete disappearance of spam campaigns using the kit since 5/6 October. It's only the latest evidence that Blackhole is history. At Apollo the majority of the attacks we encounter are client side via malicious code commonly associated with cybercrime exploit kits such as Blackhole and Neosploit. Exploit kits (EKs) are automated programs used by cybercriminals to exploit systems or applications. Gameover Zeus is a banking Trojan while ZeroAccess specialises in clickfraud, spam, and Bitcoin mining. This example shows that the Blackhole exploit kit continues to evolve with different tricks and obfuscation techniques. It spreads through phishing emails, malicious websites, and fake Tweets. Here is the VirusTotal result for the exploit code. The insidious Blackhole Exploit Kit is implicated in a huge number of malware infections. ![]() ![]() Due to the obfuscation used in both the Iframe and exploit, overall AV detection remains very poor. The Blackhole exploit kit was, as of 2012, the most prevalent web threat, where 29 of all web threats detected by Sophos and 91 by AVG are due to this. This is a nasty combination but standard fare from today's criminals and their use of crimeware platforms. BlackHole exploit kit is yet another in an ongoing wave of attack toolkits flooding the underground market. The above code exploits various older vulnerabilities. Cutwail had previously been used to distribute the Gameover Zeus malware, but the latest campaigns were now also hitting victims with a malicious iFrame redirecting to Magnitude which in turn is pushing ZeroAccess bot to anyone open to specific software vulnerabilities. First spotted in 2010, BlackHole is commercial crimeware designed to be stitched into hacked or malicious sites and exploit a variety of Web-browser vulnerabilities for the purposes of.
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