Know your EK: A content and workflow analysis approach for exploit kits

2019-02-01
Suren, Emre
Angın, Pelin
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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The prevalence and non-stop evolving technical sophistication of Exploit Kits (EKs) is one of the most challenging shifts in the modern cybercrime landscape. Over the last few years, malware infection via drive-by-download attacks have been orchestrated with EK infrastructures. An EK serves various types of malicious content via several threat vectors for a variety of criminal attempts, which are mostly monetary-centric. Malicious emails, malicious advertisements, and compromised websites redirect victim browsers to web-based EK families that are assembled to exploit client-side vulnerabilities and finally deliver evil payloads. Examples include mining crypto-currency to generate revenue, encrypting valuable files to demand ransom, stealing sensitive information for fraud, and turning the victim machine to a zombie to make it an instrument for further attacks. In this paper we provide an in-depth discussion of the EK philosophy and internals. We provide content analysis of the EK families from a publicly available dataset of over 2250 URLs using abstract syntax trees and propose strategies for protection from the devastating effects of this increasingly popular threat.
Exploit kit, Web malware, Drive-by-download, Cybercrime, Content analysis
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48873
Journal of Internet Services and Information Security
Department of Computer Engineering, Article

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Citation Formats
E. Suren and P. Angın, “Know your EK: A content and workflow analysis approach for exploit kits,” Journal of Internet Services and Information Security, pp. 24–47, 2019, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48873.
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