Social Engineering Driven Web Malware Exploitation Kit

Via Dancho Danchev's Blog -

The standardization through template-ization of bogus codec/flash player/video pages, taking place during the past two years, has exponentially increased the efficiency levels of malware campaigns relying exclusively on social engineering.

Just like phishing pages being commodity, these commodity spoofs of legitimate software/plugins relying on "visual social engineering" represent a market segment by themselves, one that some cybercriminals have been attempting to monetize for a while.

Case in point - their latest attempt to do so comes in the form of the first social engineering driven web malware exploitation kit.

Despite that the kit's author has ripped off a well known exploits-serving malware kit's statistics interface, what's unique about this release is the fact that the exploit modules come in the form of "Missing Flash Player", "Outdated Flash Player", "Missing Video Codec", "Outdated Video Codec", "Codec Required" modules.

These very same modules represent the dominant social engineering attack vector on the Internet due to the quality of the spoofs and the end users' gullibility while self-infecting themselves. For the time being, the author appears to be an opportunist rather than someone interested in setting new benchmarks for standardization social engineering by using the efficiency and delivery methods offered by a web malware exploitation kit.