The Pirate Bay is one of the most visited torrent site and a very ripe platform for hackers to go about distributing their malicious warez through different mechanisms – one of them being malicious ads. Malwarebytes, through a new report, reveals how hackers have again managed to distribute exploit kit through The Pirate Bay.
Malvertising isn’t uncommon on The Pirate Bay and Malwarebytes claims that attackers have been leveraging ad space on torrent site for drive-by downloads to distribute Angler exploit kit.
“The problem with The Pirate Bay is that it generates a lot of traffic which means a lot of potential infections, something traffers (bad guys who resell traffic) and exploit kit operators salivate about,” states Jerome Segura of Malwarebytes.
Angler scans web browsers for any outdated versions of Adobe Reader, Flash and Java and exploits vulnerabilities in these software to compromise the computer. According to Segura, hackers have been utilising exploits targeting Flash this time around and Malwarebytes anti-malware solution describes the threat as Trojan.Ransom.ED.
“At the end of the day, we are not too surprised about this malvertising attack. A site that (over)uses advertisements (and especially salacious ones) is navigating dangerous waters”, the researchers adds.
