Committing cybercrime around the Christmas tree has always been a tradition for malicious attackers introducing new ways to scam the millions of online shoppers during the holidays. This Christmas isn’t going to be an exception, but what has changed compared last couple of years is the tone of the Xmas promotions already circulating across various cybercrime communities. Do cybercriminals exchange gifts during the Christmas holidays? A recently released web malware exploitation kit coming with three different types of licenses and 9 modified exploits, aims to become “the perfect Christmas gift for all of your friends”.

Not surprisingly, the exploitation kit itself is released purely for commercial gains which when combined with the fact that it appears to be using a large percentage of the source code from a competing exploitation kit — appreciate the irony here — the already patched vulnerabilities it attempts to exploit can be easily taken care of. However, going through the infection rate statistics which were temporarily left available as a promotion tool, thousands of people have already became victim of their lack of decent situational awareness on how important patching of their third-party applications really is.

Get those patches now. Be sure to include all those third-party applications I’ve been posting about. Use the Secunia Personal Software Inspector to find what you need to update.