Cisco report: 1,800 compromised domains serving Flash zero day exploit
1,800 Domains Overtaken by Flash Zero Day — When the Blackhole exploit kit went away after the arrest of its alleged creator and maintainer Paunch, there were questions about which kit would rise up as its successor.
Context & Ripple Effects
Cisco's tally of 1,800 compromised domains is the scale marker for a shift already in motion: with the Blackhole kit gone following the arrest of its alleged creator Paunch, the Flash zero-day Adobe was investigating in January had found a new distribution channel in the Angler exploit kit. The story here is succession — not just one vulnerability, but who inherited the criminal delivery infrastructure.
The report also captures Flash at peak exposure: within months, exploits for additional Flash vulnerabilities surfaced in the Hacking Team leak, and browser-side new defenses began raising the cost of Flash-borne attacks.
First-order effects
- Operators of the 1,800 compromised domains are serving malicious Flash payloads to their own visitors, often without knowing it — cleanup and reputational damage land on them immediately.
- Angler's crew gets an exclusive window to monetize the zero-day against unpatched users until Adobe ships a fix.
Second-order effects
- With Blackhole out of the picture, rivals and buyers of crimeware are consolidating around Angler, concentrating pricing power for zero-day exploits in fewer kits.
- Adobe faces accelerating patch pressure as each Flash flaw is weaponized at domain scale within days of discovery.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, exploit-kit operations look less like a single dominant product and more like rented infrastructure — thousands of hijacked domains as interchangeable delivery rails.
- Sustained zero-day volume against one plugin accelerates the structural retreat from browser plugins toward hardened, sandboxed runtimes, shrinking the attack surface these kits depend on.
The trend: Criminal exploit delivery is consolidating from a single dominant kit into distributed networks of compromised domains racing browser vendors' defenses against Flash.