Arrest of Blackhole Author Reduces Exploit-Kit Traffic - Experts

Delhidailynews.com reported on 6th August, 2014 quoting a recently released 2014 Midyear Security Report of Cisco as "The arrest of author of Blackhole Kit has played a key role in reducing traffic of exploit-kit during H1-2014."

The midyear report was unveiled by Cisco's researchers at the Black Hat security conference held from July 27-August 1, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada (US).

Russian authorities arrested the creator of popular Blackhole exploit kit (BHEK) but experts think that despite his arrest users are not necessarily safe.

Cisco's report reveals that the dominance of Blackhole is significant with the fact that the shadowy bazaar of abuse kits or package of code for gaining advantage of popular software vulnerabilities and 87% growth in quantity of URL (Uniform Resource Locator) requests linked with EKs during first half.

The report consists of findings by several security parts of Cisco Systems pertaining to the period of 1st January to 30th June. The findings of 16 business networks reveal 94% of them had Internet traffic go to malware websites.

The company in its annual security report in December revealed that 100% of 30 observed enterprises had malicious traffic and the report also highlighted that there has been apparent surge in attacks against media enterprises.

Blackhole was associated to several cyber attacks until its suspected creator, whose nickname is Paunch, was imprisoned in last October and activity around many EKs based on Blackhole has expired since the arrest of Paunch.

Computerworld.com published a statement on 5th August, 2014 quoting Levi Gunder, Technical Lead of Cisco's threat Research Analysis and Communications, as saying "In the meantime, many different kits have been trying for hackers' attention. We have seen an explosion of new exploit kit families with names like Rig, Fiesta and Stick fighting each other for gaining more shares in the market. They compete on customer service; price and they are very difficult to be tracked down by researchers because there are so many of them."

Gunder said that there will be a chief in the secretive market and I believe it's a matter of time before another BHEK emerges and claims supremacy.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/13/2014