Black hole exploit linked to Royal birth

With the frenzy over the Royal birth, as it turns out, the baby admiring demographic also includes spammers, who are using the current frenzy over the birth of Prince William and Duchess Kate’s baby boy to direct victims to a site serving the Black Hole exploit kit.

The messages sent out by the spammers contain a link that points victims to a site claiming to offer a live feed of the news concerning the baby. The site has a link to a second site which is hosting the Black Hole exploit kit. That first site appears to have been cleaned already, so the link to the malicious site is gone.

“What we find there is basically the same textual content as we had seen in the email but there is one difference: the contained link to the “hospital-cam” is currently still alive. It contains three links with *.js naming on yet another set of hosts,” Michael Molsner, a security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, wrote in an analysis of the attack.

Drive-by downloads have been responsible for a lot of malware infections in recent years and the attackers behind these operations often rely on current events as a lure for the spam campaigns that direct visitors to the compromised sites. They’ll use whatever story happens to be in the news at the moment, whether it’s an election, a coup, a cat stuck in a tree or the birth of the heir to the British throne.