Researchers have found a new zero-day exploit in Adobe Flash used in malvertising attacks. The exploit affects the most recent version of Adobe Flash, and is now called CVE-2015-0313.
The initial analysis suggests that this might have been executed through the use of the Angler Exploit Kit, due to similarities in obfuscation techniques and infection chains.
According to data, visitors of the popular site dailymotion.com were redirected to a series of sites that eventually led to the URL hxxp://www.retilio.com/skillt.swf, where the exploit itself was hosted. The infection happens automatically, since advertisements are designed to load once a user visits a site. It is likely that this was not limited to the Dailymotion website alone, since the infection was triggered from the advertising platform and not the website content itself.
Trend Micro detects this exploit as SWF_EXPLOIT.MJST and blocks the URL mentioned above. The ads from this particular infection chain appear to be down as of this writing. This attack has been monitoring since January 14, and saw a spike in the hits to the IP related to the malicious URL around January 27. According to data from the Trend Micro, most of the users who accessed the malicious server related to the attack are from the USA.
This post serves to warn end-users and enterprises of the severity of this threat so that they take security measures. So far there were seen around 3,294 hits related to the exploit, and with an attack already seen in the wild, it’s likely there are other attacks leveraging this zero-day, posing a great risk of system compromise to unprotected systems. Since the exploit affects the latest version of Flash, 16.0.0.296, users may consider disabling Flash Player until a fixed version is released. Adobe has confirmed that this is a zero-day exploit and the patch is expected to be available this week to address this.
This is only the latest of the zero-day vulnerabilities found in Adobe Flash this month. Just some weeks ago, there were found zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player and covered under CVE-2015-0311.
