When we talk to people that have been infected, they often ask how it happened. In a growing number of cases, they have been doing nothing more than reading a news website or browsing for some online shopping. They haven’t clicked a bad link, visited a risky website or installed anything strange. However, next thing they know their credit card details have been stolen, Facebook account hijacked or the pictures on their laptop are being held to ransom.
This kind of experience is increasing amongst everyday computer users because of the growing threat from Exploit Kits. This article digs into the dark world behind this problem, which contributes to a fast growing proportion of all new malware we are now seeing and tries to provide a bit of education.
What is an Exploit Kit?
These clusters of criminal code are secretly dotted around the Internet, hiding on invisible landing pages. When you encounter one, your computer is automatically catalogued. The Exploit Kit builds up a picture of what everyday software you have running, such as browsers, PDF readers, Flash Player, Java, and most importantly whether any of these have flaws, called vulnerabilities. It is basically looking at your computer for known holes to exploit.
