This article is more than 4 years old

A malvertising campaign recently struck popular torrent site The Pirate Bay and redirected users to landing pages for the Magnitude exploit kit, where they were infected with the notorious Cerber ransomware.

Jérôme Segura, a senior security researcher for Malwarebytes, explains in a blog post that the campaign is part of an ongoing uptick in activity involving the Magnitude exploit kit.

Over the past few weeks, Segura and his fellow researchers have observed Magnitude blitzing its way past other exploit kits and distribution methods, such as compromised websites, in order to prey upon vulnerable users.

The exploit kit has even made several improvements for an occasion. That includes the implementation of a fingerprinting gate prior to the exploit landing page as well as the incorporation of CVE-2016-1019, a vulnerability which has been actively exploited on systems running Windows 10 and earlier with Flash Player 20.0.0.306 and earlier.

Adobe has since patched that flaw in an emergency security update.

Malwarebytes has documented over 400 unique malvertising incidents that specifically have come from the AdsTerra ad network since the beginning of April. Each campaign has leveraged the Magnitude exploit kit, and each has dropped the Cerber ransomware as its ultimate payload.

As regular readers of might recall, Cerber made headlines back in March for its ability to “talk” to its victims and announce it had encrypted their files before demanding US $500 in ransom.

This latest malvertising campaign follows that same general train of infection, though it does not make use of AdsTerra. Instead it leverages two fraudulent domains, as well as the Traffic Holder ad network , which specializes in buying and selling adult traffic.

The result is the same, however. Users are redirected to one of two domains where Magnitude and Cerber lie in wait.

Magnitude as well as all other exploit kits are effective only against machines that contain unpatched vulnerabilities.

With that in mind, users should make a point of implementing software patches as soon as they become available. That will not prevent them from being redirected to a malicious website, but it could help prevent an exploit kit downloading malicious code onto their computer.

Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter to read more of the exclusive content we post.