Blackhole Exploit Kit Picks-up New Java Vulnerability

A vulnerability patched in February by Oracle has been added to the Blackhole Exploit Kit, researchers have discovered. This wouldn’t normally be a headline event in and of itself, but most people seem to ignore Java once installed, and are vulnerable to dozens of attacks thinks to kits like this and the number of issues in the Java codebase.

Researchers at Trend Micro discovered the Blackhole update, noting that the recent update to the exploit packs used by the crime kit includes an exploit for one of the Zero-Day flaws that Oracle rushed to the public last month.

At the time, a number of researchers questioned the overall safety of users even after the patch was deployed, given that it wasn’t a total fix. On top of this were the calls from researchers, vendors, and even the US Government, for users to disable Java within the browser. Soon after, the browser houses got involved, disabling outdated Java versions for the safety of their users.

Now, with the addition of CVE-2013-0431 to the Blackhole Exploit Kit, Trend says this is proof that the vulnerability is here to stay. “The entry of CVE-2013-0431 into the BHEK narrative proves that this threat won’t be fading anytime soon,” Trend said in a blog post, discussing the spam runs leveraging the flaw.

“…we looked into the most affected countries by this BHEK run and got some interesting results. The most affected country is the United States, followed by Mexico. This is quite surprising, as Mexico did not generate significant infection counts in the past BHEK runs. Other countries most affected by this wave of BHEK include Germany, Latvia, Japan, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Spain and Italy.”

The full report from Trend is here, and details on February’s patch from Oracle is here.