North American tech-focused e-retailer Newegg appears to be the latest e-commerce website to have been found infected with the Magecart credit card data-scraping code.
Magecart attacks aren’t new, and RiskIQ has been tracking them since 2015, but a flurry of recent incidents has revealed a widespread infection campaign that potentially impacted hundreds of e-commerce websites.
Following the discovery of the malicious code on Ticketmaster UK in June 2018, recent reports revealed the compromise of British Airways and the presence of the information-stealing code in Feedify, a customer engagement service that serves over 4,000 customers worldwide.
Now, RiskIQ and Volexity reveal that Newegg also fell victim to the Magecart actors. The compromise, however, appears to have preceded the British Airways attack: it started on August 14, one week before the attack on the airline’s website.
The malicious code, Volexity explains, was injected into a page on secure.newegg.com, which is presented during the checkout process at Newegg and would appear once, when moving to the Billing Information page during checking out.
“The skimmer was put on the payment processing page itself, not in a script, so it would not show unless the payment page was hit. Hitting that page means a customer went through the first two steps—they would not be able to hit the checkout page without putting anything in a cart and entered a validated address,” RiskIQ says.
The page would collect form data and send it to the attackers over SSL/TLS via the domain neweggstats.com. The domain, the Volexity and RiskIQ security researchers discovered, was registered on August 13, just one day before the attack started, and used a SSL certificate issued by Comodo.
The JavaScript code used in this attack, which stayed on Newegg for over a month, was very similar to that used in the British Airways incident. It was tailored for the Newegg website, packed nearly identical functionality, but contained only 8 lines of code.
The skimmer, RiskIQ’s security researchers reveal, was designed to target both desktop and mobile customers, the same as the code used in the British Airways hack did.
“A key date in the Magecart attacks against Newegg come from the registration data of the neweggstats.com domain. The domain was registered on August 13, 2018 at approximately 16:36 UTC via Namecheap. This indicates the attackers had likely already compromised the Newegg website and were preparing to launch attacks,” Volexity notes.
The malicious domain, RiskIQ reveals, initially pointed to a standard parking host, but the actors changed it to 217.23.4.11 a day later. The IP address is associated with a Magecart drop server that receives skimmed credit card information.
“The attack on Newegg shows that while third parties have been a problem for websites—as in the case of the Ticketmaster breach—self-hosted scripts help attackers move and evolve, in this case changing the actual payment processing pages to place their skimmer,” RiskIQ concludes.
Contacted by SecurityWeek, Comodo confirmed that it issued the certificate for neweggstats.com on August 13, and also revealed that it had already revoked it. The company said it followed all industry standards and Baseline Requirements from the CA/Browser Forum when issuing the certificate.
SecurityWeek has contacted Newegg for a comment on the incident and will update the article as soon as a reply arrives.
Related: MageCart Attackers Compromise Cloud Service Firm Feedify
Related: British Airways, Another Victim of Ongoing Magecart Attacks