“The New York Times, BBC, The Hill, Newsweek, AOL, MSN, and several other top-tier domains had their ad networks hijacked over the weekend by criminals using the Angler Exploit Kit to deliver Ransomware.
Researchers at Trend Micro, Malwarebytes, and Trustwave each reported a spike in malicious traffic over the weekend that impacted thousands of websites. It isn’t clear if the upticks were part of a larger coordinated effort. What is clear is that the person(s) driving the campaign knew what they were doing.
‘This time it seems that an experienced actor has acquired an expired domain of a small but probably legitimate advertising company in order to utilize this for malicious purposes. This provides them with high quality traffic from popular web sites that publish their ads directly, or as affiliates of other ad networks, which our research has shown to lead to the Angler EK,’ Trustwave reported.”
Source: Malvertising campaign hits New York Times, BBC, others | CSO Online
