Towards the end of August 2018, FireEye identified a new exploit kit (EK) that was being served up as part of a malvertising campaign affecting users in Japan, Korea, the Middle East, Southern Europe, and other countries in the Asia Pacific region.
The first instance of the campaign was observed on Aug. 24, 2018, on the domain finalcountdown[.]gq. Tokyo-based researchers “nao_sec” identified an instance of this campaign on Aug. 29, and in their own blog post they refer to the exploit kit as Fallout Exploit Kit. As part of our research, we observed additional domains, regions, and payloads associated with the campaign. Other than SmokeLoader being distributed in Japan, which is mentioned in the nao_sec blog post, we observed GandCrab ransomware being distributed in the Middle East, which we will be focusing on in this blog post.
Fallout EK fingerprints the user browser profile and delivers malicious content if the user profile matches a target of interest. If successfully matched, the user is redirected from a genuine advertiser page, via multiple 302 redirects, to the exploit kit landing page URL.
