Neutrino Kit Adds Patched IE Vulnerability To Spread More Ransomware

The Neutrino Exploit Kit remains very dangerous to computer users all over the world. Its developers had recently provided an update to this toolkit, which includes a recently patched IE vulnerability. Albeit Microsoft has issued a fix for this problem, not all computer users have upgraded the software since that time. A lot of computers remain vulnerable to malware and ransomware until the browser is updated.

Neutrino Exploit Kit Is Keeping Up

When it comes to creating an exploit kit for hackers and Internet criminals to use all over the world, the solution needs to be updated every so often. In the most recent update is a freshly patched zero-day exploit found in Internet Explorer. Since most people hardly ever upgrade their browser whenever a security update is released, the Neutrino creators saw an opportune moment to include it.

New source code changes allow Neutrino EK users to use this exploit on unpatched computers. A proof-of-concept exploit to abuse this vulnerability was posted in June of 2016. It looks as if the neutrino creators have taken this code and implemented it into their software package.

Unlike what some people may have expected, the Neutrino team just copied and pasted the exploit code published by Theori. While there is no need to change a winning system per se, it is rather strange to see a blatant copy and paste job. Then again, the proof-of-concept exploit will do the job with relative ease, until users upgrade their IE version.

The Neutrino exploit kit has been making quite the name for itself over the past few years. Not only is this toolset being used to distributed various sets of malware, but it is also one of the main sources of spreading Bitcoin ransomware. Particularly Locky and CryptXXX are being distributed through this exploit kit.

To put this into perspective, the Neutrino exploit kit has been dropping CryptXXX in 75% of its use cases, which is quite a staggering number. Now that this new IE exploit has been added to this repertoire, more computers are vulnerable to potential ransomware infection. Installing the latest security updates is advised.

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