Posts Tagged: Visa

A Little Sunshine — 24 Comments
13
Jun 11

Organization Chart Reveals ChronoPay’s Links to Shady Internet Projects

An online criminal enterprise, as tightly structured as any legitimate business corporation, was exposed in 2010. Emails and documents taken from employees of ChronoPay — Russia’s largest online payments processor — were shared with a select group of law enforcement agencies and with KrebsOnSecurity.com. The communications provide the strongest evidence yet that a notorious rogue online pharmacy and other shady enterprises are controlled by ChronoPay executives and employees.

The leaked ChronoPay emails show that in August 2010 co-founder Pavel Vrublevsky authorized a payment of 37,350 Russian Rubles (about $1,200) for a multi-user license of an Intranet service called MegaPlan.  The documents indicate that Vrublevsky used the service to help manage the sprawling projects related to ChronoPay’s “black” operations, including the processing of payments for rogue anti-virus software, violent “rape” porn sites, and knockoff prescription drugs sold through hundreds of Web sites affiliated with a rogue online pharmacy program Rx-Promotion.com.

ChronoPay employees used their MegaPlan accounts to track payment processing issues, order volumes, and advertising partnerships for these black programs. In a move straight out of the Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs, the employees adopted nicknames like “Mr. Kink,” “Mr. Heppner,” and “Ms. Nati.” However, in a classic failure of operational security, many of these folks had their messages automatically forwarded to their real ChronoPay email accounts.

MegaPlan offers an application that makes it simple for clients to create organizational charts, and the account paid for by ChronoPay includes a chart showing the hierarchy and reporting structure of its dark divisions.

A screen shot of the organization chart from ChronoPay's MegaPlan Intranet system.

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A Little Sunshine / Web Fraud 2.0 — 15 Comments
23
Mar 11

Big Scores and Hi-Scores

Business gurus have long maintained that time = $$, but that doesn’t mean that playtime necessarily decreases the bottom line. Many corporations have discovered that their employees tend to be more productive when they have time to give their brains a break, and gameplay is the perfect escape. So it’s not surprising that some cyber criminals have taken this lesson to heart, and are crafting crime machines to include games that allow their evildoing customers to steal money and set their hi-scores at the same time.

I had a laugh when I stumbled upon the administrative panel shown in the video below. It’s a back-end Web database designed to interact with a collection of Windows PCs infected by the ZeuS Trojan. This panel receives financial data stolen from victim machines, including PayPal and Bank of America account credentials. This video shows the Bank of America tab of the tool, which also allows the criminal to inject specific “challenge/response” questions into BofA’s Web page as displayed in the victim’s browser, as a way to steal the answers to these questions should the criminal later be asked for them when later logging in to victim accounts.

Directly to the right of an option to export all stolen credentials to an easy-to-read .csv file is a button labeled “Pacman”. Clicking launches a playable, exact replica of the 1980s arcade game (enlarge the video by clicking the icon in the bottom right corner of the video panel):

I can’t help but wonder whether we will witness some perverse kind of Moore’s law with future criminal Web administration panels. I can just see it now: In 18 months, crooks writing these panels will be bundling Halo 3 and Counter-Strike with their creations!

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A Little Sunshine / Web Fraud 2.0 — 93 Comments
22
Sep 10

I’ll Take 2 MasterCards and a Visa, Please

When you’re shopping for stolen credit and debit cards online, there are so many choices these days. A glut of stolen data — combined with innovation and cutthroat competition among vendors — is conspiring to keep prices for stolen account numbers exceptionally low. Even so, many readers probably have no idea that their credit card information is worth only about $1.50 on the black market.

Don’t you just hate it, though, when online stores nickel and dime you to death? I started to get that chintzy vibe when I opened an account at rock3d.cc, one of many sites where one can buy stolen Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Amex card information. The purloined card numbers — no doubt lifted from PCs infected with data-stealing malware like the ZeuS Trojan — fetch $1.50 for U.S. accounts, and $4 (USD) for accounts belonging to U.K. residents.

And for a premium, you can obtain “fullz,” or the card data plus other useful information about cardholders, such as their date of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.

The trouble is, the minute you seek to narrow your search using the built-in tools, the site starts adding all these extra convenience fees (sound familiar?). For example, if I wanted to buy a card stolen from anyone around the Washington, D.C. area, it would probably be from a resident of McLean, Va., which is more or less a tony place where there are plenty of well-to-do folk. Anyway, the site found me a card (a MasterCard) belonging to a McLean resident alright, but then the service wanted to tack on an extra $.60 just because I isolated my search by city and state — raising the cost in my shopping cart to $2.10! No way, Jose. Not this bargain shopper.

Have you seen:

Virus Scanners for Virus Authors…The very first entry I posted at Krebs on Security, Virus Scanners for Virus Authors, introduced readers to two services that let virus writers upload their creations to see how well they are detected by numerous commercial anti-virus scanners. In this follow-up post, I take you inside of a pair of similar services that allow customers to periodically scan a malware sample and receive alerts via instant message or e-mail when a new anti-virus product begins to detect the submission as malicious.

A Little Sunshine / Latest Warnings / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 17 Comments
8
May 10

Visa Warns of Fraud Attack from Criminal Group

Visa is warning financial institutions that it has received reliable intelligence that an organized criminal group plans to attempt to move large amounts of fraudulent payments through a merchant account in Eastern Europe, possibly as soon as this weekend.

In an alert sent to banks, card issuers and processors this week, Visa said it “has received intelligence from a third-party entity indicating that a criminal group has plans to execute “a large batch settlement fraud scheme.”

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