Ecommerce can be bad for your financial health

Compromised landing page allows unauthorized collection of credit card information. 

A holiday weekend will prove more memorial for some visitors to several ecommerce sites. Customers wishing to purchase athletic gear or sign up for a competition risked having their credit card information collected by an unauthorized third party.

Detecting the infection

In the United States, Memorial Day signals the start of summer and the three-day holiday weekend kicks off with numerous large-scale promotions and sales campaigns pitching outdoor-related goods and services. Consequently, the digital advertising ecosystem usually experiences a jump in campaigns to drive traffic to ecommerce sites—a ripe opportunity to leverage.

The Media Trust team detected extraneous JavaScript code executing on the payment landing page for several medium-sized, sports-oriented ecommerce websites.

First detected in the early afternoon of Saturday, May 28, legitimate advertising creative directed users to legitimate ecommerce sites which happened to be compromised. The “angular” domain (angular.club) injected superfluous JavaScript throughout the sites to collect information input by a user, such as race registration or financial details associated with a purchase.

Diagnosing the financial headache

The angular domain injected UTF-8 encoded script throughout the entire ecommerce site and obfuscated itself by adopting the name of the site into its script, i.e., angular.club/js/site-name.js. Searching on the root domain “angular.club” redirects to “AngularJS.org”, a valid Google JavaScript framework and another attempt at misdirection to hide the true intention.

It’s likely the bad actor penetrated the content management system (CMS) or website theme template in order to ensure the code executed on all pages, especially the payment landing page.

Example of JavaScript

This code collects a range of financial and personally identifiable information (PII) including billing name, address, email, telephone number, credit card number, expiration date, and CVV.

The information is then sent to another server unassociated with the ecommerce site owner. The host of the angular domain and the web service that collects the credit card information are owned by the same entity, whose host server is in Germany and registered to someone in Florida.

Per The Media Trust team, there is no valid coding reason for this JavaScript to be on the website. The script’s sole purpose is to inject a block of code into the web page to collect credit card information and send it to another server where it can be used for future use—purchase online goods, sold on the dark web, used to buy domains to launch additional attacks, etc.

Assessing the health of the ecommerce site

The ecommerce site operators removed the code from there sites late on Tuesday, May 31. Frankly, the damage was already done.

During a strong promotional period, several small- to medium- sized ecommerce sites did not realize their expected traffic. Due to the malicious nature of the landing page associated with these campaigns, The Media Trust alerted our ad tech clients to block the serving of the ads. In one instance, seven different creative supporting more than 200 ad impressions did not execute. In addition, one of the campaigns promoted an event with an expiration date of Wednesday, June 1.

Prescribing the cure

The Internet can be a scary place, full of bad actors looking to make a quick buck by preying on the good nature of others—consumers and website properties alike. Holiday periods are when the online ecosystem experiences a surge in attacks, and no business or organization is immune.

The lesson learned is that brand and corporate websites are just as vulnerable to attack as ad content. And, ecommerce is especially vulnerable due to the direct impact to revenue.

The best defense is to be on constant alert, a security posture that is difficult for most to assume. That’s why many firms leave it up to the experts to continually scan their online and mobile ecosystem. Continuous website monitoring will alert you to an anomalous or unexpected behavior of third-party vendors and first-party, website operator code. Upon detection, these issues can be immediately resolved thereby keeping your ecommerce operation alive and kicking.

Content Management Systems: Friend or Foe?

The downside of open source affordability and flexibility

More than 7,000 ecommerce sites were shut down this past weekend due to malware infiltrating the open source or community version of Magento, a popular content management system. Unfortunately, this type of revenue-impacting event has become all too common with similar attacks affecting WordPress, Joomla and Drupal within the past 12 months. As thousands of online merchants have just learned, taking advantage of the affordability and flexibility offered by an open-source website vendor requires investment in continuous site security.

Start-up savior

Millions of small and medium-sized merchants rely on open source content management systems (CMS) to support their initial foray into online commerce. These platforms provide a “plug-n-play” infrastructure that pulls together basic design schema, content delivery features and shopping cart capabilities—critical cost-saving tools for a start-up operation. Platform providers make these tools available in the hopes that as the retailer grows it will seek more features and eventually upgrade to a more robust, enterprise version. But, these supposedly “free” tools come with a price.

When free isn’t free

Open source is a great resource; however, it is not supported by the vendor. Open source platforms rely on a passionate community of users to build plug-ins and extensions which extend the capability of the free tool. A major shortfall is that open source lacks the protection users expect—there’s no accountability for the developer community should something go horribly wrong. In fact, the very nature of open source suggests that the “source” is “open” to all who wish to contribute.

Bad actors easily infiltrate these communities and cause considerable harm. From compromising an existing extension to creating a flawed one, bad actors can quickly penetrate thousands of ecommerce operations and execute a host of crimes—mine for credit card data, trigger malware downloads onto shopper browsers, deface the site with inflammatory language or completely disable site operations, to name a few. Whatever the action, the merchant suffers serious damaging consequences from which it may not ever recover.

To protect an ecommerce operation, online merchants need to invest in security measures to ensure the open source environment is safe from compromise. This means a thorough review of all code and vendors used to render the site on consumer browsers—both front-end services, like image library and product recommendation, and back-end services, like CMS and content delivery networks. In effect, open source is not really free, as the money saved from licensing needs to be poured back into IT to secure the site.

Preparing for the worst

Considering that an open source platform can bring an ecommerce site to its knees, online merchants must keep abreast of industry news and take immediate action to locate and fix compromised code. In addition, merchants should also adopt basic security best practices such as:

1. Regular participation in the open source community to know when issues are detected and how to resolve
2. Careful screening of plug-ins and extensions before using in your environment
3. Limited use of un-vetted extensions
4. Continuously monitoring of the third-party vendors executing on the site

The best way to secure revenue continuity is to constantly monitor the site for anomalies and unexpected vendor behavior. Upon detection, these issues can be immediately resolved thereby keeping your ecommerce operation alive and kicking.

For those not planning to upgrade to a licensed, vendor-supported platform, an effective security program will be your best friend. The Media Trust can make the introduction.

 

Ecommerce–What’s happening on your site?

Wayward third-party vendors impact site performance, collect first-party data and expose site visitors to malware

Online shopping is now a primary revenue source for many retailers, and its growth trajectory is forecast to continue its double-digit growth rate. With their high-volume traffic and access to consumers’ credit cards, these sites also serve as revenue sources for hackers and fraudsters, who find retailers’ reliance on third-party vendors especially appealing. They gain access to sites by compromising legitimate third-party vendors.

Pinpointing the third-party vendors

Everyday ecommerce sites are rife with third-party vendors, many of them not clearly visible to site owners. These services provide the interactive and engaging experience consumers have come to expect and also enable the site to be monetized. Unbeknownst to many retailers, the third-party vendors they use to render these critical services—product reviews, content recommendation engines, payment systems, automated marketing services, analytics, content delivery networks, social media tools and more—can unintentionally function as a conduit for a host of unsavory activities including malware drops, first-party data collection, and latency-causing actions.

The challenge is to quickly identify the point of compromise, yet most ecommerce site operators don’t have a clear grasp of the vendors actively executing on their digital properties. The following infographic of a typical ecommerce site provides clues to where vendors can be found.

[Get your pdf copy at www.TheMedia.Trust]

Check yourself before you wreck yourself

How do you control these vendors and what they do on your site? The ability to effectively manage an ecommerce site requires intricate command of the technology, processes and vendors needed to render pages that not only meet revenue goals, but do so without compromising the user experience. This means the site must be free of malware, performance-sapping vendors and privacy-violating data collection activity.  To protect against third-party code’s inherent risks, ecommerce teams must work with their IT, information security, and legal teams to constantly monitor—in real time—the code executing on their sites. Otherwise, a host of activities can be underway without your knowledge which can negatively impact the user experience, your brand and your revenue stream.

Guess what? Corporate websites are out of your control

Recognizing how websites and mobile apps have transformed business models

Marriott. Toys R Us. Darden Restaurants. Wal-Mart. Kraft. Neiman Marcus. Dell. What do these diverse companies have in common? They are all digital publishers.

As highlighted in a recent article, Dell spends millions of dollars each year developing content for their public-facing website. From placing advertisements to writing stories about women in technology to creating informative videos, Dell recognizes the power of digital content as an important part of the sales process. And their public-facing website serves as the primary communication channel to their most valuable asset—the customer. Dell isn’t alone.

Once relegated to traditional media companies, the concept of a digital publisher has morphed to encapsulate any organization that uses digital channels to promote their business—either directly with coupons, product reviews and ecommerce capabilities or indirectly via promotional videos, polls and recipes. In effect, any firm with a digital property—website or mobile app—should consider themselves a digital publisher.

Digital content is outside your control

Digital content and the channels through which it is acquired and delivered requires a new approach to security.

High-quality, informative websites and mobile apps attract visitors, and this attention draws evildoers. Looking to capitalize on your hard-won customers and website traffic, these bad actors mine for poor web code to exploit. They redirect visitors outside your page, launch malware downloads, and steal valuable visitor data, to name a few actions that no reputable business wants. In fact, online and mobile channels are the primary vectors for malware, with 85% of all malware distributed via the web.

Securing public-facing digital properties should be easy, right? The challenge is that most of the code delivering the interactive and engaging user experience that renders on the site visitor’s browser is from a third party and therefore outside your control. As a matter of fact, third-party code makes up more than 78% of the code found on Fortune 1000 websites. Think about it. Almost every corporate website uses video, blog, talent acquisition and social media tools in addition to the standard backend data analytics and marketing platforms. Though incorporated into your website design, these third-party providers execute outside your website’s technical operation thereby minimizing your ability to control their security or activity. And they are often compromised. (Read more about third-party code providers.)

Responsibility of Securing public-facing digital properties

Viewed from a digital publisher lens, strategic business growth depends on delivering a top-notch user experience to website visitors and mobile apps users—customers and employees. Securing these digital properties means closely monitoring third-party activities to ensure they are not dropping malware, collecting unauthorized user data or negatively impacting site performance.

With digital publishing comes responsibility. Embrace it.