SYDNEY/AUCKLAND– January 16, 2012 – The recently discovered vulnerability disclosed last week on Thursday has been finally patched by Oracle, but exploitation continues on computers that have not been updated.
Exploitation code is included in the world’s most frequently used exploit packs such as BlackHole, Nuclear Pack and the Cool Exploit Kit, resulting in cyber-criminals taking advantage of the huge pool of vulnerable computers by planting ransomware.
Bitdefender has identified multiple campaigns that use the CVE-2013-0422 bug in Java to infect client machines with the notorious IcePol (also known as Reveton). Once the computer is successfully infected, the user is denied access to the desktop until payment of a ransom, which the criminals call a ‘fine’.
Most of these attacks are directed from servers in the UK, Canada and the US but this doesn’t mean that Australia is safe. We ranked 14th in terms of countries being affected by the exploit, with 0.87 per cent of the total number of incidents worldwide involving the exploit taking place in Australia. The Reveton ransomware has localised in multiple languages using IP addresses of the infected computers, and victims are spreading across the world. All it takes is a vulnerable version of Java.
Bitdefender also offers a free removal tool for computer users who don’t have a Bitdefender product and have already been infected with the IcePol ransomware. The tool is available immediately via the Bitdefender Toolbox. Bitdefender customers have always been protected since the emergence of the threat by multiple layers of defense, from page blocks to signatures on the exploit files.
To stay safe, Bitdefender recommends consumers patch their Java distribution immediately to Update 11. Bitdefender also advises that users disable the Java plugin in the browser they are using for web-related tasks and only enable it in an alternative browser to be used for tasks requiring Java.