Ecommerce: Payment card stealing malware

Authored by Chris Olson, CEO and Co-Founder, The Media Trust.

Malware compromise demonstrates how payment security standards are in dire need of an update for the digital environment.

A bad actor has upped the stakes in his campaign to collect consumer payment card information by expanding his reach to mid-tier ecommerce providers across the US, UK and India, covering a range of industries including apparel, home goods, beauty and sporting event registrations.

Echoing a similar scenario observed over Memorial Day weekend in 2016, the bad actor injected a transparent overlay on top of the credit/debit card information block on a payment page so that a victim’s financial information is surreptitiously collected and sent to another party, not the e-retailer.

Considering these ecommerce firms earn anywhere from a $10,000 to $400,000 a day, the ecommerce firms risk significant revenue loss and negative consumer confidence. In addition, they also demonstrate inadequate security processes, even though these processes may comply with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.

[Please note, The Media Trust has a policy of not revealing the names of websites experiencing an active compromise. Affected ecommerce site operators were, however, notified of this breach.]

The big picture

The infection gradually spread to a number of small and mid-tier ecommerce sites in the US, UK and India, over the last few days. Upon analysis, The Media Trust discovered that each ecommerce provider uses the same open source content management system (CMS) to serve as the consumer-facing front end. The CMS platform’s master page script is infected with one of the several malicious domains. The malicious domain is present in the website’s footer section which means that it permeates every page of the site and not just the checkout page.

In addition, researchers detected multiple domain pairs, which were registered by the same bad actor within the past few months and labeled as suspicious by The Media Trust within two weeks of creation. The domains are now overtly malicious. To avoid detection, the malicious domains execute over varying time intervals and, in at least one instance, move from website to website across the three regions.

Scenario breakdown

In the course of supporting our clients, The Media Trust first detected the malicious actor via client-side scans of advertising-related content, i.e., creative, tags and landing page. The ecommerce site serves as the landing page for an advertising campaign.

The actor used multiple techniques to carry out his attack. In the following scenario, the landing page contains <assetsbrain[dot]com>, extraneous code unnecessary for the proper execution of a payment.

Malicious domain in the website’s footer

When the victim chooses to make a purchase via the checkout page, <assetsbrain[dot]com> performs two distinct actions: executes JavaScript to inject a transparent overlay on top of the payment card information block and drops a user-identifying cookie.

Execution of transparent overlay

After input of card details, the malicious domain sends the information to <bralntree.com/checkPayments[dot]php>, an obvious spoof of a common payments platform.

Because the ecommerce operator doesn’t receive the card details, the shopper receives an error message and/or request to re-submit their payment information. The unauthorized cookie identifies the user and therefore does not execute the malicious script when the user re-enters the payment card information.

Online transactions remain a risky endeavor

In the realm of compromises, this infection highlights the inadequacy of current PCI security standards. Issued by the Payment Card Industry Council in 2005, the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) aims to protect cardholder data used during online financial transactions. Backed by the world’s largest credit card issues, PCI DSS requires online merchants to conform to a set of standards such as regular website and server vulnerability checks.

The affected ecommerce sites do not have certifications or seals demonstrating PCI compliance. Their privacy policies declare regular scanning and website security policy review; however, these processes are insufficient, since traditional web application security (appsec) solutions are not able to effectively detect malicious behavior executing via third-party code.

Proving the fallibility of traditional web application scanning utilities, all domains (ecommerce providers, initial malicious domain and spoofed payments platform) are considered clean by VirusTotal as of early morning May 16.

Protect your business by securing your revenue stream

Any size ecommerce provider can protect their revenue and reputation by adopting the following website risk management strategies:

• Secure your CMS platform: Review security processes with the CMS platform and keep all code and plugins up to date.
• Surpass PCI DSS standards. Demand more rigorous scanning of the entire website to identify compromise of both owned and third-party code not visible to the website operator.
• Audit operations. Document all vendors and their actions when executing on your website. This helps you quickly identify anomalous behavior and establishes a remediation path.

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.