Symantec, a California based Cybersecurity vendor says that ‘Formjacking’ has become the latest earning trend for hackers as they have lost interest in Ransomware and Cryptojacking due to low profits.
In the 24th edition of Internet Security Threat Report(ISTR), Symantec says that its security researchers have detected more than 4600 websites infected with the formjacking malware code in 2018 on a monthly note.
“Formjacking is being witnessed on a large scale and has become a commoditized attack last year”, said Nick Savvides, CTO of Symantec- Asia Pacific division.
According to the IST report of Symantec, ransomware and Cryptojacking became less prevalent between DEC’17 and Feb’18 due to a dip in the value of cryptocurrency in the online markets.
So, as the profits have dropped, cyber crooks have moved to Formjacking as compromising a major website and obtaining large amounts of credit card numbers is proving extremely profitable to them these days as a single credit card data is being sold for $45 and so just the data from a bunch of credit cards can yield up to $2.2 million for cybercriminals each month.
The telemetry data of the security vendor says that victims of the attack are mostly small scale retailers who sell either clothing line to gardening equipment and medical supplies.
Precisely speaking, Formjacking can affect any business which accepts online payments from customers. This could be explained in simple words as follows- let us suppose an individual has made a purchase online and has submitted related info to the website. When the website gets compromised with malware, the second copy of info is sent to cyber criminals who get hold of data such as name, billing address, shipping address to exploit later.
Symantec says that it has blocked more than 3.7 million formjacking attacks on endpoints in 2018, with nearly 1/3rd of them occurring in the busy shopping season of Christmas’18.
Note- Formjacking can be defined as an online payment page with an embedded malicious JavaScript through which sensitive payment details can be accessed by hackers located remotely.
