Magecart Attack

In our daily life, we hear about new threats or vulnerabilities in this technology world. But this Magecart attack is the latest threat, and this is also well known as a harvesting attack. The hacking groups make the Magecart effective and persistent where they use to steal the customer payment card data through skimmers. Here we will discuss how do they get work and how you can mitigate the risk.

What is Magecart?

If you want to know correctly about this, then your question has to be, who Megacart is? It is a global consortium this has at least seven different cybercriminal groups. They are behind high-profile cyber-attack, which is happening for the past few years.

Their main motto is to steal the financial and personal data of the customers who mainly purchase goods online. Continuing this they are achieving success. In 2019, just for 2.5 hours survey investigator has come to know that there is a total of 80 compromised eCommerce sites that were globally found and those were actively sending the credit card numbers to some off-site server that was under control by Megacart group.

Now the question, is where did this Magecart come from? As we understood, this grew out of a single group that had started in 2014 and they started injecting web skimmers. After this, it got emerged with another skimmer in 2016. The researcher believes that the skinner evaluation and multiplication continue every day.

Why is the Magecart Attack Increasing?

There are many reasons for the Megacart attack to increase. Nowadays there is a big pool of victims to target compare to before. Most of the citizens purchase things online, and few the regular online shopper. The percentage is growing in our country, and it has become 91% in 2023.

it is very difficult for every criminal to target physical credit card transactions because of the secure chip system. Few frauds steal the data from the bricks, which helps malicious software or scammer; those are called “dump data”. The security code (CVV) they steal from a payment card from the online retailer because without that, it is not worth having the remaining data. To make their work easier, cybercriminals only focus on hacking e-commerce websites instead of doing anything else.

On the dark web, they also get a single piece of payment card information. This is not only the place to buy and sell the stolen data. It also enables the cyberattack hacking tool which is very easily available on the laptop.

Nowadays, website owners outsource the critical components with their code including shopping cart, card payment, and much more. These all are handle by third parties. Websites make use of imported code directly linked with the third-party script hosted by the web. The code can be complicated and may come from different sources, which is beyond the boundary of a traditional internal IT system.

How do Magecart Attack Works?

Data skimming attacks magecart effectively, where you can follow the well-established pattern. Hackers need to achieve three things to gain success. Those are below:

Step 1: Need to gain access to your website: There are two ways for the hacker to gain access to your website and get the skinning code. They can even break into their infrastructure and place the skinner there. Sometimes they will even go after the third-party vendor comes; that time it becomes easier to reach the target. Sometimes third-party tags will run to the malicious script, and at that time, you need a browser.

Step 2: Skim sensitive information from a form: There are many ways to can capture the data but the skimming code includes JavaScript which listens to the personal information and collects it. The attacker always sees the approach and tries to monitor the keypresses which are on the sensitive page. They also search for something that has the intercepted input in a specific part of a webform which including the CVV field of the credit card. Mainly, the attacker will hide the malicious code inside the other code, which will help you avoid detection.

Step 3: send information back to their server: This is the last and very simple part of the whole process. As soon as hackers gain access to your website, they will start to scrape the data. As soon as they can send any information from the end user’s browser which will reach any location through the internet.

What is digital skimming, and how does Magecart steal customer data?

Magecart hackers inject the malicious JavaScript (JS) code, from the customer’s credit card. They also get some other information when a customer enters while checkout time; this is well known as online skimming or web skimming.  They can easily exploit the vulnerable plugin to get access to inject the code they have got from the third-party software library.

Through the supply chain, they can target everything, including a third-party chatbot that helps to perform the web management function. PCI prevents the customers storing from their three-digit credit card security code through the website servers so that criminals can focus their effort on the client’s website and capture the details they have entered. These are one kind of attack that is challenging to detect, and as soon as they use this type of client-facing side, you will get infected without the customer’s awareness. customer’s information gets share without him having any information.

How is the Magecart Attack different from traditional online skinning?

Magecart is synonymous with the skimming attack, and hacker groups continue to expand and evolve with the attack method. The researcher has recently uncovered a new type of JavaScript skimmer that got infected while doing online checkout with 17 e-commerce websites so that they can steal payment card data.

The skimmer discovers the Magecart group by compromising the creative ad scripts to generate the traffic of thousands of sites at once. As a result, Magecart can make up to 17 percent of malicious advertisements at a time.

In 2019 researchers also saw that Magecart adopted another attack method that compromised the thousands of websites with skimming code.

Final Thoughts

Cybercriminals are increasing day by day, and organization’s owners are always in tension to save their organization. As you know, Magecart only makes small changes to the security code and the organization has to catch that for their safety purpose.

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Gurubaran is a co-founder of Cyber Security News and GBHackers On Security. He has 10+ years of experience as a Security Consultant, Editor, and Analyst in cybersecurity, technology, and communications.