Rigging compromise – RIG Exploit Kit

This Post was Authored by Nick Biasini, with contributions by Joel Esler

Exploit Kits are one of the biggest threats that affects users, both inside and outside the enterprise, as it indiscriminately compromises simply by visiting a web site, delivering a malicious payload. One of the challenges with exploit kits is at any given time there are numerous kits active on the Internet. RIG is one of these exploit kits that is always around delivering malicious payloads to unsuspecting users. RIG first appeared in our telemetry back in November of 2013, back then we referred to it as Goon, today it’s known as RIG.

We started focusing on RIG and found some interesting data similar to what we found while analyzing Angler. This post will discuss RIG, findings in the data, and what actions were taken as a result.

The Exploit Kit Overview

RIG compromises users like any exploit kit. It starts with a user being redirected to a landing page. This is done via malicious iframes or malvertising and looks similar the following:

It begins with an initial link to a javascript: