More than 100 real estate websites belonging to the same parent company were injected with web skimmer code via an unnamed cloud video platform.
Increasingly popular, skimmer attacks involve the use of malicious JavaScript code to steal data provided by users on the targeted website.
As part of this recent campaign, Palo Alto Networks explains, skimmer code was injected into a video so that it was automatically embedded into websites that imported the video.
The attack was possible because the abused cloud video platform allows users to add their own JavaScript customizations to players, by uploading a JavaScript file that is included in the player.
Leveraging this function, the threat actors provided a script that could be modified upstream, which allowed them to add the malicious content after the player was created.
“We infer that the attacker altered the static script at its hosted location by attaching skimmer code. Upon the next player update, the video platform re-ingested the compromised file and served it along with the impacted player,” Palo Alto Networks notes.
Highly obfuscated to hide its malicious purpose, the JavaScript code was designed to detect credit card patterns, verify the credit card numbers, and harvest the card data and send it to the attackers.
The skimmer was also designed to gather the users’ personal information, including names, phone numbers and email addresses, as well as to check the validity of the harvested data and send the information to the attackers’ command and control (C&C) server.
“The skimmer itself is highly polymorphic, elusive and continuously evolving. When combined with cloud distribution platforms, the impact of a skimmer of this type could be very large,” Palo Alto Networks says.
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