Three individuals suspected of being involved in Magecart online skimming attacks were arrested late last year in Indonesia.
The arrests were made as part of an international effort called Operation Night Fury, which saw participation from Interpol’s ASEAN Cyber Capability Desk and Indonesian Cyber Police, as well as private cybersecurity company Group-IB.
Over the past couple of years, numerous hacking groups have been operating under the Magecart umbrella, infecting thousands of e-commerce websites with JavaScript code designed to steal customers’ credit card data.
The suspects, aged 23, 27 and 35, allegedly managed to infect hundreds of online commerce sites from Indonesia, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Brazil, and other countries, and have stolen the data of thousands of users worldwide, Indonesian authorities say.
The three suspects, identified only by their initials (ANF, K and N), were arrested in Jakarta and Yogyakarta on December 20. Other suspects from the same group remain at large, authorities said.
One of the arrested individuals apparently admitted on Indonesian television to injecting web skimmers on various websites since 2017, Sanguine Security reports.
During the operation, authorities seized “laptops, mobile phones of various brands, CPU units, IDs, BCA Token, ATM cards,” Group-IB reveals. If found guilty, the suspects face up to 10 years in jail.
Sanguine Security attributes a total of 571 attacks on e-commerce websites to these individuals. Despite that, the security firm says, they have been responsible for only 1% of all Magecart incidents since 2017.
The security company also notes that, following the arrests, several card collection servers remain active and have been modified, including the magecart.net domain. The same code was found on 27 more stores, the company says.
Group-IB, which has been tracking this specific family of JavaScript code sniffers since 2018, says that an analysis of the hackers’ infrastructure shows that they infected 200 websites. The investigation into the group’s activities, however, continues, and the number of websites is expected to be higher.
The investigation also revealed that the hackers used the stolen payment data to buy goods such as electronic devices or luxury items, and then resold them online in Indonesia at below the market prices.
The hackers used VPNs to access the servers storing stolen data and their skimmer’s control servers, and relied only on stolen credit card data to pay for hosting services and buy new domains.
Related: Magecart Attack on eCommerce Platform Hits Thousands of Online Shops