Donors to Australia Fire Site Treated as Suckers by Magecart

E-commerce fraud has no morals. That was starkly shown recently when a site that collected donations for victims of the Australian fires was hit with the Magecart skimmer, which steals payment data that has been entered on websites.

The Magecart malware is a malicious JavaScript script that is inserted into a site's commerce pages. When entries are made (in this case, the donors to the fund) for financial information on that page, the information is sent to another website under the attacker's control.

The Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence Team were the ones to discover the problem and announce it on Twitter. They found that a skimmer named "ATMZOW" was sending the stolen data to an exfiltration domain "vamberlo[.]com" which was already known to the team.

Troy Mursch of Bad Packets Reports also said on Twitter that 39 other sites were also compromised by the same malware. These sites contain the ATMZOW skimmer as part of their code, according to the PublicWWW tool.

The exfiltration domain was obfuscated in the actual scripting, but eventually detected. It has been shut down as of now. While that may stop data from being lost to that domain, it is still possible for the criminals at another time to modify the skimming script so that it will send the information to another exfiltration location.

Deepak Patel, security evangelist at PerimeterX, commented about all of this.

"Magecart attackers keep hitting new lows," he said. "The attackers recently targeted a website that is collecting funds to help with the Australian brush fires. The attack kit was deployed on multiple domains confirming the organized effort of a Magecart group targeting sites that use the same underlying third-party code."

"Attackers have always compromised unprotected web servers, but with Magecart they have found an easy way to skim users' credit card data complete with names, addresses, zip codes and CVV numbers. These comprehensive stolen credit card records are worth more on the dark web than individual components."

"Given the lack of visibility to such client-side attacks, the website owners find out about the data breach days or weeks after the code injection. The extended time allows skimmers to monetize the stolen cards to the fullest extent."

"Any site that processes user PII and accepts payments should take steps to shore up their application security by tracking and monitoring the first- and third-party code execution on their sites in real time."

— Larry Loeb has written for many of the last century's major "dead tree" computer magazines, having been, among other things, a consulting editor for BYTE magazine and senior editor for the launch of WebWeek.