Media Coverage

We uncovered a recent activity involving the notorious online credit card skimming attack known as Magecart. The attack, facilitated by a new cybercrime group, impacted 201 online campus stores in the United States and Canada.

We started detecting the attacks against multiple campus store websites on April 14, during which the sites were injected with a malicious skimming script (detected by Trend Micro as Trojan.JS.MIRRORTHEIF.AA) at their payment checkout pages.

With special thanks to our colleagues at abuse.ch and The Shadowserver Foundation for helping with the sinkholing of Mirrothief’s malicious domain and remediation reporting.

Akamai DNS Team: Be real. A Communications Service Provider’s (CSP’s) customer will not use their home to attack the Domain Name System (DNS). They might as well unplug from the Internet. Yet, customers get infected, CPEs get violated, and miscreants all over the Internet reflect attacks off CSP customers to attack others. This abuse happens every day. It is part of the “noise” of the Internet. It is also a major threat to the Internet. What does a CSP do when 30% of their customers are infected with malware?  The good news for CSPs is that organizations like CyberGreen and Shadowserver Foundation provide infection data and metrics as a public service.

Gangs using malicious JavaScript code to steal payment info target multiple online shopping platforms used by thousands of small stores; more advanced ones rely on tactics to remain undetected for a longer period. Generically known as Magecart because the Magento payment platform is a frequent target, the web skimming scripts are injected on checkout pages and collect credit and debit card details when customers pay for an order. In a report today, RiskIQ researcher Yonathan Klijnsma details a large-scale operation Magecart Group 12 led against OpenCart online stores. It used stealth tactics to keep its activity under the radar and pilfer as much payment info as possible. The domain used by the attacker is no longer active as RiskIQ together with AbuseCH and the Shadowserver Foundation took it offline.

With our internet-wide telemetry, RiskIQ has discovered some of the most significant Magecart attacks ever carried out. These involved a host of different tools and tactics including several different inject types, skimmers of varying sophistication, and countless intrusion methods. But for every Magecart attack that makes headlines, we detect thousands more that we don’t disclose. A considerable portion of these lesser-known breaches involves third-party payment platforms. The most notorious of these payment platforms is Magento. RiskIQ’s first blog post on Magecart introduced it as a new breed of threat centered around attacks on Magento, and recent developments show that stores running Magento are still a prime target for skimming groups. Considering the frequency with which Magecart groups target Magento, many security professionals associate Magecart (and web skimming in general) with Magento. The domain batbing.com has been taken offline as part of this publication. We would like to thank AbuseCH and the Shadowserver Foundation for their continued support on these actions.

You may have recently received a letter and/or email from Virgin Media explaining that we have been notified that a device on your network has a vulnerability known as an Open DNS Resolver. If you have received such a communication from us, read the advice given on this page to help resolve the issue. Note: This article is intended to provide advice. We suspect a device connected to your home network may have an open DNS resolver vulnerability. For more information on these reports please visit dnsscan.shadowserver.org

The ShadowServer Foundation is an organisation of volunteers that gathers and analyses data on botnets and malware propagation. The collected data is sent to National CSIRTs and network owners via a daily free remediation feed, and has been used to support law enforcement investigations. The talk by Piotr Kijewski focused on how ShadowServer operates, what data it collects, and its achievements in taking down botnets.

Recently, Proofpoint researchers have been tracking the massive Smominru botnet, the combined computing power of which has earned millions of dollars for its operators. With the help of abuse.ch and the ShadowServer Foundation, we conducted a sinkholing operation to determine the botnet size and location of the individual nodes. The botnet includes more than 526,000 infected Windows hosts, most of which we believe are servers. These nodes are distributed worldwide but we observed the highest numbers in Russia, India, and Taiwan.

A Paris-based online advertising company was hacked, and its infrastructure used to deliver malicious JavaScript code to online stores, code that was designed to steal payment card details entered in checkout pages. Last year, one group that RiskIQ tracked as Magecart Group 5, pioneered this tactic and was responsible for hacks at 12 third-party companies, hacks through which Group 5 delivered its malicious card stealing code to thousands of online store. Now, RiskIQ says that a new group, which they’re tracking as Magecart Group 12, appears to have copied Group 5’s modus operandi and has breached Adverline to exploit its infrastructure in a similar fashion. RiskIQ says it’s been working with AbuseCH and the ShadowServer Foundation to take down Group 12’s server infrastructure, which appears to have been set up two months before the Adverline hack, in September 2018.

Notorious British hacker-for-hire jailed for cyber attacks on a Liberian telco after an international criminal justice operation. British cyber criminal Daniel Kaye has been jailed for two years and eight months for attacks that took Liberia offline and severely disrupted a Liberian telecommunications provider, resulting in losses estimated at tens of millions of dollars.