A new version of BlackHole, one of the most popular exploit kits out there, has been made available by its creator, who has supposedly rewritten it from scratch.


BlackHole 2.0 brings many improvements:

• Dynamic URL generation in order to foil the automatic systems for downloading exploits used by security researchers
• The removal of exploits for "old" vulnerabilities, and the inclusion of three different exploit packs - one including Java exploits, the second exploits for the Adobe PDF LibTiff vulnerability (CVE-2010-0188), and the third for Internet Explorer's Microsoft Data Access Components flaw (CVE-2006-5559) - a rather old vulnerability that still gets taken advantage of because of unpatched IE6 browsers
• Links can get renamed to human readable format (for example /news/index.php) instead of kept in the obviously suspicious format that includes a slew of random characters (for example /Main.php?Varname=lgjlrewgjlrwbnvl2)
• JAR and PDF exploits run only if vulnerable versions of plug-ins are detected, so they don't trigger detection by antivirus package unnecessarily
• A new administration panel with a considerable number of new options

In spite of all these changes, the new version of the exploit kit costs the same as the previous one: a one-year license for those criminals that use their own servers amounts to $1500.

The kit can also be rented from the author's server, and that will cost $50 per day (up to 50,000 hits) or $500 per month (up to 70k hits per day).

The advert for BlackHole 2.0 was spotted on the underground forum site Exploit.ln, and was translated from Russian with the help of Google Translate by the Malware Don’t Need Coffee blog team.