Exploit kits are not as widespread as they used to be. In the past, they relied on the use of already patched vulnerabilities. Newer and more secure web browsers with automatic updates simply do not allow known vulnerabilities to be exploited. It was very different back in the heyday of Adobe Flash because it’s just a plugin for a web browser, meaning that even if the user has an up-to-date browser, there’s a non-zero chance that Adobe Flash may still be vulnerable to 1-day exploits. Now that Adobe Flash is about to reach its end-of-life date at the end of this year, it is disabled by default in all web browser and has pretty much been replaced with open standards such as HTML5, WebGL, WebAssembly. The decline of exploit kits can be linked to the decline of Adobe Flash, but exploit kits have not disappeared completely. They have adapted and switched to target users of Internet Explorer without the latest security updates installed.
Microsoft Edge replaced Internet Explorer as a default web browser with the release of Windows 10 in 2015, but Internet Explorer is still installed for backward compatibility on machines running Windows 10 and it has remained a default web browser for Windows 7/8/8.1. The switch to Microsoft Edge development also meant that Internet Explorer would no longer be actively developed and would only receive vulnerability patches without general security improvements. Still, somehow, Internet Explorer remains a relatively popular web browser. According to magnitude exploit evolution
