Numerous online shopping malls rigged with malware that steals credit card information

About 500 e-commerce websites were recently revealed to be infiltrated by hackers who installed a credit card skimmer that stealthily gathered sensitive data when visitors attempted to make a transaction.

A report published on Tuesday is merely the latest one using Magecart, an umbrella name given to rival criminal gangs who infect e-commerce sites with skimmers. Over the past several years, hundreds of sites have been affected by flaws that force them to run malicious code. When visitors submit credit card data upon purchase, the malware transfers such information to attacker-controlled servers.

Fraud courtesy of Naturalfreshmall[.]com

Sansec, the security firm that uncovered the current set of infections, claimed the compromised sites were all loading malicious scripts stored at the domain naturalfreshmall[.]com.

“The Natural Fresh skimmer presents a bogus payment popup, undermining the security of a (PCI compliant) hosted payment form,” business researchers stated on Twitter. “Payments are transmitted to https://naturalfreshmall[.]com/payment/Payment.php.”

The hackers then changed existing files or planted new files that offered no less than 19 backdoors that the hackers could employ to keep control over the sites in the event the malicious script was identified and deleted and the susceptible software was upgraded. The only method to thoroughly disinfect the site is to detect and remove the backdoors before upgrading the vulnerable CMS that caused the site to be hacked in the first place.

Sansec worked with the admins of compromised sites to discover the common access point utilised by the attackers. The researchers subsequently concluded that the attackers coupled a SQL injection bug with a PHP object injection attack in a Magento plugin known as Quickview. The weaknesses allowed the attackers to execute malicious code directly on the web server.

They accomplished this code execution by manipulating Quickview to add a validation rule to the customer eav attribute database and inserting a payload that deceived the host application into constructing a malicious object. Then, they joined up as a new user on the site.

But merely adding it to the database won’t really run the malware, Sansec experts said. Unserializing the data is truly necessary for Magento. Furthermore, this attack’s brilliance lies in its ability to initiate an unserialize just by perusing the Magento sign-up page.”

More than a week after Sansec first revealed the campaign on Twitter, it’s easy to locate sites that are still infected. Bedexpress[.]com was still using JavaScript from the rogue naturalfreshmall[.]com domain at the time of this post’s publication.

These sites were using an outdated version of the Magento e-commerce platform that will be phased down in June 2020. Upgrade to the most recent version of Adobe Commerce if you’re still using this out-of-date package. There are also open source fixes available for Magento 1 that can be installed using either DIY software from the OpenMage project or paid service from Mage-One.

In the absence of specialised training, it might be difficult for the general public to recognise payment-card skimmers. Malwarebytes, for example, is an antivirus programme that scans a website’s JavaScript in real time. Although there’s not a guarantee that a site is safe if it appears to be utilising obsolete software, people may wish to avoid certain sites.###