Over the past three years, one of the groups operating under the Magecart umbrella has targeted over 570 e-commerce websites and likely made more than $7 million, threat intelligence company Gemini Advisory reports.
Referred to as Keeper, the group operates 64 attacker and 73 exfiltration domains and has hit targets in 55 countries since April 1, 2017. All domains use the same dedicated server and have identical login panels.
The adversary mainly targeted sites using the Magento CMS (85% of victims), with the largest percentage (28%) of the compromised e-commerce sites located in the United States, with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands rounding up top three.
Keeper was observed updating its techniques to increase chances of success, such as employing obfuscation and updating the code in their malicious scripts, but repeatedly leveraged the domain fileskeeper[.]org for injecting a web skimmer and receiving stolen data.
The group disguised malicious domains as legitimate services, and even attempted to mimic legitimate sites through the use of a different top-level domain or by slightly changing the domain name. They also attempted to imitate payment gateways and website plugins.
Gemini managed to gain access to a Keeper control panel, where details on 184,000 cards apparently compromised between July 2018 and April 2019 were stored. Based on the period of activity, the security researchers estimated that the group was likely able to collect approximately 700,000 compromised cards.
“Given the current dark web median price of $10 per compromised Card Not Present (CNP) card, this group has likely generated upwards of $7 million USD from stealing and selling compromised payment cards in its full lifespan,” Gemini explains.
Keeper mainly targeted small to medium-sized merchants across a variety of countries. Some of the most popular sites, which engaged in selling jewelry, electronics, clothing, liquor, and custom promotional products, had more than 500,000 or over one million visitors each month.
“The Keeper Magecart group has been active for three years, over which time it has continually improved its technical sophistication and the scale of its operations. Based on this pattern of successful Magecart attacks, Gemini assesses with high confidence that Keeper is likely to continue launching increasingly sophisticated attacks against online merchants across the world,” Gemini notes.
Related: Magecart Attacks on Claire’s and Other U.S. Stores Linked to North Korea
Related: Magecart Hackers Continue Improving Skimmers
Related: Magecart Attack on eCommerce Platform Hits Thousands of Online Shops
