credit card hacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A U.S. national has pleaded guilty in a Missouri court to operating a darknet carding site and selling financial information belonging to tens of thousands of victims in the country. Michael D. Mihalo , aka Dale Michael Mihalo Jr. and ggmccloud1, has been accused of setting up a carding site called Skynet Market that specialized in the trafficking of credit and debit card data. Mihalo and his associates also peddled their warez on other dark web marketplaces such as AlphaBay Market, Wall Street Market, and Hansa Market between February 22, 2016, and October 1, 2019. "Mihalo assembled and directed the team that helped him sell this stolen financial information on the darknet," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  said  in a press statement released on May 16, 2023. "Mihalo personally possessed, sent, and received the information associated with 49,084 stolen payment cards with the intent that the payment card information would be trafficked on darknet sites, all i...

A newly discovered Magecart skimming campaign has its roots in a previous attack activity going all the way back to November 2021. To that end, it has come to light that  two   malware  domains identified as hosting credit card skimmer code — "scanalytic[.]org" and "js.staticounter[.]net" — are part of a broader infrastructure used to carry out the intrusions, Malwarebytes said in a Tuesday analysis. "We were able to connect these two domains with a  previous campaign from November 2021  which was the first instance to our knowledge of a skimmer checking for the use of virtual machines," Jérôme Segura  said . "However, both of them are now devoid of VM detection code. It's unclear why the threat actors removed it, unless perhaps it caused more issues than benefits." The earliest evidence of the campaign's activity, based on the additional domains uncovered, suggests it dates back to at least May 2020. Magecart  refers to a cybercrim...

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Image Source: Toptal The notorious Emotet malware has turned to deploy a new module designed to siphon credit card information stored in the Chrome web browser. The credit card stealer, which exclusively singles out Chrome, has the ability to exfiltrate the collected information to different remote command-and-control (C2) servers, according to enterprise security company  Proofpoint , which observed the component on June 6. The development comes amid a  spike  in  Emotet   activity  since it was resurrected late last year following a 10-month-long hiatus in the wake of a law enforcement operation that  took down its attack infrastructure  in January 2021. Emotet, attributed to a threat actor known as TA542 (aka Mummy Spider or Gold Crestwood), is an advanced, self-propagating and modular trojan that's delivered via email campaigns and is used as a distributor for other payloads such as ransomware. As of April 2022, Emotet is still the ...

Adobe on Sunday rolled out patches to contain a critical security vulnerability impacting its Commerce and Magento Open Source products that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-24086 , the shortcoming has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10 on the vulnerability scoring system and has been characterized as an " improper input validation " issue that could be weaponized to achieve arbitrary code execution.  It's also a pre-authenticated flaw, meaning it could be exploited without requiring any credentials. Additionally, the California-headquartered company pointed out that the vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker with non-administrative privileges. The flaw affects Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.3-p1 and earlier versions as well as 2.3.7-p2 and earlier versions. Adobe Commerce 2.3.3 and lower are not vulnerable. "Adobe is aware that CVE-2022-24086 has been exploited in the wild in very limited attacks targeting Ad...

A special law enforcement operation undertaken by Russia has led to the seizure and shutdown of four online bazaars that specialized in the theft and sales of stolen credit cards, as the government continues to take active measures against harboring cybercriminals on its territory. To that end, the domains operated by the card fraud forms and marketplaces, Ferum Shop, Sky-Fraud, Trump's Dumps, and UAS, were confiscated and plastered with a banner that warned "theft of funds from bank cards is illegal." Also embedded into the HTML source code was a message asking, "Which one of you is next?" The seizures were orchestrated by the Department "K," a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation that focuses primarily on information technology-related crimes, according to  Flashpoint . In a related development, state-owned news agency TASS  said  that six Russian individuals were being charged with "the illegal circulation o...

UniCC, the biggest dark web marketplace for stolen credit and debit cards, has announced that it's shuttering its operations after earning $358 million in purchases since 2013 using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether, and Dash. "Don't build any conspiracy theories about us leaving," the anonymous operators of UniCC said in a farewell posted on dark web carding forums, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. "It is [a] weighted decision, we are not young and our health do[es] not allow [us] to work like this any longer." The UniCC team also gave its users 10 days to spend their balances, while also warning customers to "not follow any fakes tied to our comeback." Platforms such as UniCC function as an underground marketplace wherein credit card details stolen from online retailers, banks, and payments companies by injecting  malicious skimmers  are trafficked in exchange for cryptocurrency. The cards are then used by crim...

Threat actors leveraged a cloud video hosting service to carry out a supply chain attack on more than  100 real estate websites  operated by Sotheby's Realty that involved injecting malicious skimmers to steal sensitive personal information. "The attacker injected the skimmer JavaScript codes into video, so whenever others import the video, their websites get embedded with skimmer codes as well," Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers  said  in a report published this week. The skimmer attacks, also called formjacking, relates to a type of cyber attack wherein bad actors insert malicious JavaScript code into the target website, most often to checkout or payment pages on shopping and e-commerce portals, to harvest valuable information such as credit card details entered by users. In the latest incarnation of the Magecart attacks, the operators behind the campaign breached the Brightcove account of Sotheby's and deployed malicious code into the player of the ...

Cybercrime actors part of the Magecart group have latched on to a new technique of obfuscating the malware code within  comment blocks  and encoding stolen credit card data into images and other files hosted on the server, once again demonstrating how the attackers are  continuously improving  their infection chains to escape detection. "One tactic that some Magecart actors employ is the dumping of swiped credit card details into image files on the server [to] avoid raising suspicion," Sucuri Security Analyst, Ben Martin,  said  in a write-up. "These can later be downloaded using a simple  GET request  at a later date." Magecart is the umbrella term given to multiple groups of cybercriminals targeting e-commerce websites with the goal of plundering credit card numbers by injecting malicious JavaScript skimmers and selling them on the black market. Sucuri attributed the attack to  Magecart Group 7  based on overlaps in the tactics, t...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a novel attack that could allow criminals to trick a point of sale terminal into transacting with a victim's Mastercard contactless card while believing it to be a Visa card. The research, published by a group of academics from ETH Zurich, builds on a study  detailed last September  that delved into a PIN bypass attack, permitting bad actors to leverage a victim's stolen or lost Visa EMV-enabled credit card for making high-value purchases without knowledge of the card's PIN, and even fool the terminal into accepting unauthentic offline card transactions. "This is not just a mere card brand mixup but it has critical consequences," researchers David Basin, Ralf Sasse, and Jorge Toro said. "For example, criminals can use it in combination with the previous attack on Visa to also bypass the PIN for Mastercard cards. The cards of this brand were previously presumed protected by PIN." Following responsible disclosu...

Joker's Stash, the largest dark web marketplace notorious for selling compromised payment card data, has announced plans to shut down its operations on February 15, 2021. In a message board post on a Russian-language underground cybercrime forum, the operator of the site — who goes by the name "JokerStash" — said "it's time for us to leave forever" and that "we will never ever open again," according to twin reports from cybersecurity firms  Gemini Advisory  and  Intel471 . "Joker goes on a well-deserved retirement. Joker's Stash is closing," the post read. "When we opened years ago, nobody knew us. Today we are one of the largest cards/dumps marketplace[s]." The exact reason for the shut down is still unclear. Joker's Stash, since its origins in 2014, emerged as one of the biggest players in the underground payment card economy over the years, with over $1 billion generated in revenues. The news of the imminent sh...

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Interpol have allegedly seized proxy servers used in connection with Blockchain-based domains belonging to Joker's Stash, a notorious fraud bazaar known for selling compromised payment card data in underground forums. The takedown  happened  last week on December 17. The operators of Joker's Stash operate several versions of the platform, including  Blockchain proxy server domains  — .bazar, .lib, .emc, and .coin — that are responsible for redirecting users to the actual website and two other Tor (.onion) variants. Joker's Stash implemented the use of  Blockchain DNS  via a  Chrome browser extension  in 2017. These Blockchain websites make use of a decentralized DNS where the top-level domains (e.g., .bazar) are not owned by a single central authority, with the lookup records shared over a peer-to-peer network as opposed to a DNS provider, thus bringing in significant advantages like  bul...

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed a new kind of modular backdoor that targets point-of-sale (POS) restaurant management software from Oracle in an attempt to pilfer sensitive payment information stored in the devices. The backdoor — dubbed "ModPipe" — impacts Oracle MICROS Restaurant Enterprise Series (RES) 3700 POS systems, a widely used software suite in restaurants and hospitality establishments to efficiently handle POS, inventory, and labor management. A majority of the identified targets are primarily located in the US. "What makes the backdoor distinctive are its downloadable modules and their capabilities, as it contains a custom algorithm designed to gather RES 3700 POS database passwords by decrypting them from Windows registry values," ESET researchers said in an analysis . "Exfiltrated credentials allow ModPipe's operators access to database contents, including various definitions and configuration, status tables and information ab...

Cybersecurity researchers today highlighted an evasive phishing technique that attackers are exploiting in the wild to target visitors of several sites with a quirk in domain names, and leverage modified favicons to inject e-skimmers and steal payment card information covertly. "The idea is simple and consists of using characters that look the same in order to dupe users," Malwarebytes researchers said in a Thursday analysis . "Sometimes the characters are from a different language set or simply capitalizing the letter 'i' to make it appear like a lowercase 'l'." Called an internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack , the technique has been used by a Magecart group on multiple domains to load the popular Inter skimming kit hidden inside a favicon file . The visual trickery typically involves leveraging the similarities of character scripts to create and register fraudulent domains of existing ones to deceive unsuspecting users into...

A United States federal district court has finally sentenced a Russian hacker to nine years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty of running two illegal websites devoted to facilitating payment card fraud, computer hacking, and other crimes. Aleksei Yurievich Burkov , 30, pleaded guilty in January this year to two of the five charges against him for credit card fraud—one count of access device fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud, identity theft, computer intrusions, wire fraud, and money laundering. Burkov admitted to operating a website named Cardplanet that was dedicated to buying and selling stolen credit card and debit card data for anywhere between $2.50 and $10 per payment card, depending on the card type, origin, and availability of card owner information. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Cardplanet hosted roughly 150,000 payment card details between 2009 and 2013, most of which belonged to U.S. citizens and used to make over $...

In what's one of the most innovative hacking campaigns, cybercrime gangs are now hiding malicious code implants in the metadata of image files to covertly steal payment card information entered by visitors on the hacked websites. "We found skimming code hidden within the metadata of an image file (a form of steganography) and surreptitiously loaded by compromised online stores," Malwarebytes researchers said last week. "This scheme would not be complete without yet another interesting variation to exfiltrate stolen credit card data. Once again, criminals used the disguise of an image file to collect their loot." The evolving tactic of the operation, widely known as web skimming or a Magecart attack, comes as bad actors are finding different ways to inject JavaScript scripts, including misconfigured AWS S3 data storage buckets and exploiting content security policy to transmit data to a Google Analytics account under their control. Using Steganography ...

Hacking groups are continuing to leverage misconfigured AWS S3 data storage buckets to insert malicious code into websites in an attempt to swipe credit card information and carry out malvertising campaigns. In a new report shared with The Hacker News, cybersecurity firm RiskIQ said it identified three compromised websites belonging to Endeavor Business Media last month that are still hosting JavaScript skimming code — a classic tactic embraced by Magecart , a consortium of different hacker groups who target online shopping cart systems. The unpatched affected websites host emergency services-related content and chat forums catering to firefighters, police officers, and security professionals, per RiskIQ. www[.]officer[.]com www[.]firehouse[.]com www[.]securityinfowatch[.]com The cyber firm said it hasn't heard back from Endeavor Business Media despite reaching out to the company to address the issues. As a consequence, it's working with Swiss non-profit cyber...

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered an ongoing new Magecart skimmer campaign that so far has successfully compromised at least 19 different e-commerce websites to steal payment card details of their customers. According to a report published today and shared with The Hacker News, RiskIQ researchers spotted a new digital skimmer, dubbed " MakeFrame ," that injects HTML iframes into web-pages to phish payment data. MakeFrame attacks have been attributed to Magecart Group 7 for its approach of using the compromised sites to host the skimming code, load the skimmer on other compromised websites, and siphon off the stolen data. Magecart attacks usually involve bad actors compromising a company's online store to siphon credit card numbers and account details of users who're making purchases on the infected site by placing malicious JavaScript skimmers on payment forms. It's the latest in a series of attacks by Magecart, an umbrella term for eight diffe...

Online guitar tutoring website TrueFire has apparently suffered a 'Magecart' style data breach incident that may have potentially led to the exposure of its customers' personal information and payment card information. TrueFire is one of the popular guitar tutoring websites with over 1 million users, where wanna-be-guitarists pay online to access a massive library of over 900 courses and 40,000 video lessons. Though TrueFire hasn't yet publicly disclosed or acknowledged the breach, The Hacker News learned about the incident after a few affected customers posted online  details of a notification they received from the company last week. The Hacker News also found a copy of the same ' Notice Of Data Breach ' uploaded recently to the website of Montana Department of Justice , specifically on a section where the government shares information on data breaches that also affect Montana residents. Confirming the breach, the notification reveals that an attack...