Researchers at Symantec recently discovered that poplar video-sharing site Dailymotion was redirecting users to the Sweet Orange exploit kit.
For its victims, the Sweet Orange kit may be sour to taste. The kit exploits vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Java and Adobe Flash Player. The researchers discovered the infection June 28. The site was cleaned last week, and is no longer infected.
“We believe that the attackers compromised Dailymotion in order to target a large number of users,” blogged Symantec’s Ankit Singh. “Dailymotion is in Alexa’s top 100 most popular websites list, so the attackers could have potentially infected a substantial amount of users’ computers with malware through this attack. We found that the campaign mainly affected Dailymotion visitors in the US and Europe.”
The attackers injected an iFrame into the site that redirected users to a site that in turn sent them to a landing page of the Sweet Orange kit. The kit went after vulnerable plugins on the user’s computer and dropped the appropriate exploits. In particular, Sweet Orange is known for exploiting the following vulnerabilities:
- Microsoft Internet Explorer Use-After-Free Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2013-2551)
- Adobe Flash Player Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (CVE-2014-0515)
- Oracle Java SE Remote Java Runtime Environment Vulnerability (CVE-2013-2460)
All of these vulnerabilities have been patched by their respective vendors.
“If the kit successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities, then Trojan.Adclicker was downloaded onto the victim’s computer,” Singh noted. “This malware forces the compromised computer to artificially generate traffic to pay-per-click Web advertisements in order to generate revenue for the attackers.”
In a statement to IDG News Service, Dailymotion admitted that it was attacked by malware June 28 through a malvertising campaign, and added that the attack led to the shutdown of a “very limited number of pages of dailymotion.com” for a short period of time.
“This malware attack has not been specifically targeting Dailymotion but has impacted a large number of publishers,” the spokesperson stated.