Getting to Know Magecart: An Inside Look at 7 Groups

A new report spills the details on Magecart, the criminal groups driving it, and ongoing attacks targeting low- and high-profile victims.

If youre in cybersecurity, youve likely heard of Magecart, the threat operation thats quickly gaining notoriety as it ramps up financial data theft across the Internet.
Magecart is an umbrella term for at least seven cybercriminal groups that have been installing digital credit card skims onto e-commerce websites for years. Over the past few months, the operation has gone from relatively unknown to nationally recognized as its victims have expanded from consumers to global brands including British Airways, Ticketmaster, and Newegg.
Researchers from RiskIQ and Flashpoint teamed up to build a timeline of Magecarts evolution and detail the threat groups and commercial infrastructure driving its growth. Their report, Inside Magecart: Profiling the Groups Behind the Pivotal Credit Card Breaches and the Criminal Underworld that Harbors Them, covers past and ongoing Magecart attacks.
RiskIQ threat researcher Yonathan Klijnsma says theyve been keeping an eye on Magecart since 2015, when the threat grew out of a single groups activities and began putting skimmers on vendor websites. Magecart flew under the radar, infiltrating more than 800 e-commerce sites with card skimmers, until it
breached
Ticketmaster UK with a supply chain attack in July 2018. Shortly after, it was
linked
to the British Airways hack that affected 380,000 customers.
These attacks on large companies put Magecart in global headlines and could have broader implications among the criminal community as they lower barriers of entry and raise excitement for other criminal groups, explains Vitali Kremez, director of research at Flashpoint. He calls these high-profile breaches pivotal and fuel for the underground economy.
The researchers have tracked each criminal group that makes up Magecart. While groups in this report are well-defined, many more groups and individuals add to the web-skimming threat.
An Introduction to Magecarts Groups
Group 1 was first spotted in 2015 and so far has more than 2,500 victims. It cast a wide net with its skimmer, likely using automated tools to compromise websites and upload skimmer code. The original skimmer was made up of JavaScript embedded into e-commerce pages. When someone entered payment card data into a form, the skimmer copied it and sent it to a drop server.
In late 2016, Group 1 began to mimic the activities of Magecart Group 2; now, researchers have combined them into a single entity. Their victims include several thousand stores, the National Republican Senate Committee, and Everlast.
Group 3 has been on researchers radar since 2016 and has compromised more than 800 victims. Like some of the other groups, it aims for high attack volume and to snag as many cards as possible. However, it steers clear of high-end web retailers.
Group 3s skimmer takes a different approach: Instead of checking the URL to see if the skimmer is running on a checkout page, attackers instead check if any forms on the page hold payment data. If they do, the skimmer steals that information. Its goal is to ensure it has the names and addresses of customers and exfiltrate all of it.
Group 4 is an advanced group that is extremely careful with skimmer placement, researchers report. Its focused on high volumes of compromise with the goal of getting as many cards as possible without specifically targeting anyone. Group 4 tries to blend in with normal Web traffic and registers domains by copying ad providers, victims domains, and analytics providers.
Its a different approach to setting up the infrastructure, setting up the skimming, says Klijnsma of Group 4. Researchers believe this group stems from another criminal operation involved with malware distribution and hijacking online banking with web injects.
Group 5, which was implicated in the Ticketmaster breach, primarily targets third-party suppliers to maximize its reach. It was first seen in 2016 and so far has 12+ victims. The web supply chain is unique, researchers say, because any service that provides ads, content, analytics, or other functionality can be targeted — which makes it appealing to Group 5. With one compromise, the group can hit thousands of sites without targeting individual merchants.
Something not a lot of companies are realizing is theres a supply chain to websites, Klijnsma points out. Whenever you have a third party executing script on your website, thats a risk.
Related Content:
Google Traffic Temporarily Rerouted via Russia, China
7 Non-Computer Hacks That Should Never Happen
Sophisticated Campaign Targets Pakistans Air Force
2018 On Track to Be One of the Worst Ever for Data Breaches

Black Hat Europe returns to London Dec. 3-6, 2018, with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier security solutions, and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the
conference
and
to register.

Last News
▸ Debunking Machine Learning in Security. ◂ Discovered: 23/12/2024 Category: security	▸ Researchers create BlackForest to gather, link threat data. ◂ Discovered: 23/12/2024 Category: security	▸ Travel agency fined £150,000 for breaking Data Protection Act. ◂ Discovered: 23/12/2024 Category: security

**Cyber Security Categories**
Google Dorks Database	Exploits Vulnerability	Exploit Shellcodes

CVE List

Tools/Apps

News/Aarticles

Phishing Database

Deepfake Detection

Trends/Statistics & Live Infos

Tags:
Getting to Know Magecart: An Inside Look at 7 Groups