Scammers’ Sites or ‘Web Injection Shops’ Selling Sophisticated Phishing Tools

According to a recent news report from Anti-Fraud Command Center of RSA Security Inc., it is understood that the underground online fraud community's economic lifecycle functions in much the same way as that of legitimate businesses.

The new RSA report revealed that the supply chain of underground fraud is becoming increasingly sophisticated both operationally and technically, and RSA has termed this facility as "Fraud-as-a-service" in short "FaaS". FaaS comprises services for improved hosting, cash out services and Trojan infection toolkits - all available for trade in the fraudsters' black market.

As per the report, a few fraudsters have set up websites that RSA analysts refer to as "Web Injection Shops" designed to sell so-called HTML injections, or pieces of code with which phishers can imitate the appearance of any financial institution's web pages. These pages usually include those that request for users' log-in details. The code further allows the perpetrators to add new areas on the pages that would never ask for.

The RSA analysts said that the injections normally accompany Trojans or codes that fraudsters loaded on the PCs of unsuspecting users as they clicked on unfamiliar e-mail links or view certain websites. The current price for HTML injections can be found to vary between $10 and $30 each, according to the sort of code and the institution targeted, reports RSA.

According to the RSA report, the HTML injections in discussion could work in the same way as phishing toolkits, Internet tools that help in launching phishing attacks. Since these tools have propagated in forums for scammers and hackers, their prices have dropped.

The report also revealed that when HTML injection offerings saturate the fraud market, their prices might fall as HTML pages are quite easy to design, as reported by DIGITAL TRANSACTIONS on December 30, 2008.

In addition to these findings, the RSA report estimates that about 207 popular financial institutions were struck by phishing scams during November 2008 as compared to a low 167 in October 2008. These institutions included US banks, both national and regional, as well as credit unions.

» SPAMfighter News - 07-01-2009

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