The Kings of Copy and Paste Exploits

The Sundown Exploit Kit authors have proven themselves to be the masters at copy and paste having stolen exploits from rivals and doing away with encryption when they want originality.

These kits offer a wide range of tools for a myriad of attacks to the unsuspecting victim. They are becoming more popular because they offer more than a couple different ways to aim their malicious outcomes at computers. It is more or less a competition to see who can build the most powerful, useful, and adaptable exploit kits by reverse programming patches to include the newest exploits.

Sundown is a rather small player, on a wide market where kits with enough juice behind them can earn the creator’s tens of millions of dollars, not to mention unwanted attention from various law enforcement agencies.

It has been around more than a year, and seems to have made a home for itself among the exploit elite. The kit’s persistence may be explained by its focus on cheap code ripping. The reusing of exploits is common, but it’s usually not common for the ripped code kits to hang around as long as Sundown has. Researchers at Spiderlabs say that Sundown’s developers have instead succeeded by having been extremely lazy.

The study of Sundown has shown that they found that the developers have used an Internet Explorer exploit code from a long dead Angler exploit kit and ripped a Silverlight exploit from their rival kid RIG.

A third exploit was taken from an Italian Law Enforcement hack, from 2015. The fourth and final exploit was taken from Adobe Flash, and ripped from the a much larger kit called Magnitude.

“The lesson for today it seems is that there is no honor among thieves,” researchers said.

Sundown is appearing cheaper because it took little work for it to become a reality, essentially ripping apart other kits already in use, to make a kind of pieces and parts exploit kit.

Prices for the second most popular kit rose from $3500 to $7000 after Angler fell in 2015. It is now known that this is thanks to the massive arrests of hackers throughout Russia.

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