Trend Shows Cybercriminals Are Turning to Formjacking

Trend Shows Cybercriminals Are Turning to Formjacking

A newly released global cyberthreat trend shows that cybercriminals are turning to formjacking as a new get-rich-quick scheme.

In the recently released Internet Security Threat Report, Symantec reported that on average, more than 4,800 unique websites are compromised with formjacking every month. According to Symantec, formjacking has increased dramatically since mid-August 2018. By the end of 2018, Symantec said it detected 3.7 million formjacking attacks, with nearly a third of all detections occurring during November and December – the busiest online shopping period.

Symantec said that while any organization, regardless of size and location, which processes payments online is a potential victim of formjacking, small and medium-sized retailers are, by and large, the most widely compromised by formjacking attackers.

What Is Formjacking?

Formjacking is a type of cyberattack that injects malicious code into website forms. This malicious code allows attackers to steal credit card details and other personal and financial information that are entered into the compromised forms as information is automatically sent to attackers. Stolen information could be used by attackers to perform payment card fraud or attackers could sell these details to other cybercriminals.

According to Symantec, attackers need only 10 stolen credit cards from each of the more than 4,800 compromised websites each month to earn up to $2.2 million per month considering that the current value for each card is $45 in underground selling forums.

How Are Formjacking Attacks Carried Out?

In recent months, two methods of formjacking attacks were observed: supply chain attack and redirection chain.

Supply Chain Attack

One of the ways by which formjacking attackers gain access to a website and change the code on its checkout page is through supply chain attack. In a supply chain attack, attackers gain access to a large organization’s website and change the code on its checkout page by exploiting the security vulnerabilities in a smaller business used by the larger company to provide different services.

The Ticketmaster formjacking case is an example of a formjacking attack carried out by means of a supply chain attack. In the Ticketmaster case, attackers injected malicious code into Ticketmaster’s checkout pages after compromising a chatbot used by Ticketmaster for customer support. This malicious code enabled the Ticketmaster attackers to capture payment card data and other information from customers and send them to their servers.

The chatbot used by Ticketmaster for customer support was hosted by Inbenta, an external third-party supplier to Ticketmaster. Inbenta chief executive Jordi Torras toldZDNetthat attackers exploited a number of vulnerabilities of Inbenta’s servers and in the process altered the chatbot code.

"It has been confirmed that the source of the data breach was a single piece of JavaScript code, that was customized by Inbenta to meet Ticketmaster's particular requirements," Jordi Torras said. "The JavaScript we created specifically for Ticketmaster was used on a payments page, which is not what we built it for. Had we known that script would have been used in that way, we would have advised against it, as it poses a security threat."

The Ticketmaster formjacking case, therefore, wasn’t directly an attack against Ticketmaster but an attack on a third-party supplier Inbenta. It’s worthy to note that supply chain attack was also used in the NotPetya attack in 2017 in which MEDoc, a tax and accounting software package, was used for the initial insertion of NotPetya malware into corporate networks.

Supply chain attacks show that cybersecurity hygiene shouldn’t only be implemented within an organization’s internal IT systems but also for third-party software and applications.

Redirection Chain

Redirection chain as a means of carrying out a formjacking attack is a new technique used by attackers in late 2018. In a redirection chain attack, a user that uses a checkout page of an online retailer is redirected to the checkout page of another online retailer which is injected with formjacking code. When this user enters payment information, the information is sent both to the retailer as well as to the attackers. 

In December 2018, Symantecreported that it detected a checkout page of a retail store in Paris which was injected with a formjacking code. The injected formjacking code, Symantec said, collects the payment information entered by customers and posts it to the domain google-analyitics.org.

Symantec observed that popular online retailers’ checkout pages from different countries, such as the U.S., Japan, Australia, and Germany redirected to this one Paris checkout page. “This created an interesting redirection chain as customers of all these websites were being infected by formjacking at the same time,” Symantec said.

Symantec added that to make matters worse, the formjacking code in the above-mentioned redirection chain attack comes with Firebug, a debugging tool that prevents security researchers from analyzing the malicious code.

Prevention

Formjacking attacks are becoming sophisticated and stealthy as shown in the above-mentioned examples. Users of compromised checkout pages may not realize they’re victims of formjacking as compromised checkout pages generally continue to operate as normal.

Here are some cybersecurity measures in order to prevent formjacking attacks:

• Test new updates of third-party software in small test environments in order to detect any malicious code.
• Monitor all system activities to block malicious application before any damage can be done.
• Use Subresource Integrity (SRI), a security feature that enables browsers to verify that resources they retrieve are delivered without unexpected manipulation.

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