One way to foil the bad guys is to simply back up your system with a relatively low-cost external hard drive, Biasini said.
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The Talos security team, at Cisco, were monitoring the Angler Exploit Kit, which is “currently one of the most effective tools for nicking personal information”, in case you are interested.
One of the web’s most notorious methods for infecting devices with malware has been curtailed by security researchers at Cisco Systems.
Once they win control of a target’s computer, exploit kit buyers can install whatever they want, including so-called ransomware.
“This is a significant blow to the emerging hacker economy where ransomware and the black market sale of stolen IP, credit card info and personally identifiable information are generating hundreds of millions of dollars annually”, Cisco stated in the blog post.
Talos, collaborating with OpenDNS and Level 3 Threat Research, investigated Angler’s telemetry data and found that a large amount of its activity was being generated within a single provider, Limestone Networks. According to the report, researchers found “more than 15,000 unique sites pushing people into the exploit kit, 99.8% percent of which were used less than ten times, illustrating the low frequency”.
To block the attacks, Talos updated products to prevent redirects to the Angler proxy server and patched the vulnerabilities Angler used.
Then Cisco broadcast Angler protocols and mechanisms “so others can protect their communities”, Biasini wrote.
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Angler is constructed in a proxy/server configuration, with a single exploit server responsible for serving malicious activity through multiple proxy servers, according to Cisco. “It’s just an intermediary between the proxy servers and the real command-and-control or exploit server”. Much of that activity consisted of ransomeware campaigns, in which an attacker is able to infiltrate a target computer, lock access to it, and threaten to permanently delete all of its files if the machine’s owner does not pay the ransom.
