Miscreants have unleashed a new strain of a sophisticated Trojan that targets eBay users by feeding them spoofed web pages containing fraudulent information about high-ticket purchases, The Register has learned. It has already contributed to an $8,600 loss by one eBay member.
The Trojan installs a scaled-down webserver on an infected machine that masquerades as eBay and several third-party destinations frequently used to sniff out fraudulent offerings, including Carfax.com, Autocheck.com and Escrow.com.
When a victim browses to one of these sites, the webserver creates a parallel universe of sorts, in which the victim sees counterfeit pages designed to counter fraud protection mechanisms offered by eBay and third-party sites.
“To think that somehow they got software on their system that managed to spoof all the validation sites – that’s a shit-scary story,” said Roger Thompson, a researcher at Exploit Prevention Labs who specializes in web-based attacks. “It’s fiendishly clever.”
The malware was found on the machine of one eBay Motors user who recently lost $8,650 after trying to buy a 2005 Jeep Liberty advertised for 10 days on the site. Customer representatives have refused to cover the theft because, they said, the transaction was made outside of eBay.
Shortly after making the offer, the victim received a notification in the My Messages section of her eBay account telling her she had won the auction. eBay has long cautioned users not to rely on notifications unless they appear in this official section.
The malware installed on the victim’s machine caused her browser to display a counterfeit version of just such a message. Had she used a non-infected computer to access her account, no such message would have appeared.
“There’s no reason to suspect it’s fraud until its too late,” said the Ohio-based user, who agreed to tell her story on the condition her identity was not revealed. The Register was able to verify the scam by confirming details with eBay and by reviewing screenshots, emails and files pulled from her machine.
The malware appears to be a reworking of Trojan.Bayrob, which first came to light in early March when researchers from Symantec wrote reports about it.
It arrives in an attachment to an email responding to a bid and installs a local proxy server that redirects traffic bound for eBay. The proxy, according to Symantec, spoofs sensitive pages on eBay, including online auction’s “ask a question” messaging feature. The Trojan also inflates the user feedback score of the purported buyer, according to Symantec.
In the intervening seven months, the Trojan has been updated so that, among other things, traffic bound for sites such as Carfax and nine other addresses maintained by third-party companies will also be redirected. This helps thwart victims who try to independently confirm details fed on the falsified eBay pages.
eBay spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe says the company’s security team has forwarded samples of the new strain to anti-virus companies so they can add it to the updates they send to customers.
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The White House is preparing a new initiative to protect against what it fears could be a crippling attack against the U.S. by computer, from overseas, and in particular, from China.
After a series of cabinet-level meetings this month at the White House, computer security analysts say the Bush administration is considering creating a new agency or cyberwar center to better protect the federal government’s computers and find ways to help private companies and public utilities fend off computer attacks.
Those attacks, which could be just a few key strokes away, could shut down U.S. power grids and communication and banking systems, security analysts warn.
“Basically we would find the lights go out, the dial tone stop and we have no ability to access our money,” Sami Saydjari, founder and president of the Cyber Defense Agency, told ABC News.
Internet security companies, such as Akamai in Boston, are currently tracking thousands of attacks against the U.S. government and corporate computer systems every day.
“We would not be in a good situation if we were to enter a cyberwar today,” Akamai co-founder and chief scientist Tom Leighton said.
On most days, the single biggest source of those attacks is China.
“A Chinese general has talked about how they would reach out through cyberspace and turn off the American electric power grid before any conflict with the United States,” said Dick Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official and now ABC News consultant.
White House advisors say alarm bells sounded when this past June Chinese hackers got into the unclassified computers of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
“The intelligence community has come to the recognition that China and other foreign governments have free run of American computer networks,” Clarke said.
In addition to long-distance hacking, U.S. experts are concerned Chinese-made computer equipment could be sabotaged in ways that are undetectable, the so-called Trojan horse attack.
“My fear is that there are many, many Trojan horses, many, many malicious codes in a large number of our critical systems,” Saydjari said. “And that there are just waiting to be activated through some trigger at some time.”
The White House says it is asking for $6 billion in the latest budget to increase cybersecurity.
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eBay is one of the most successful Internet-only ventures of all time, so it’s not surprising that it has come under near-constant attack by fraudsters and hackers. In the latest attempt, a hacker logged on to the eBay Trust and Security forums and pretended to post as 1,200 separate users, making it appear as if he had actually logged in with each user’s account. The posts contained the users’ names, contact information, and credit card numbers.
That done, the hacker posted a video of his exploits on YouTube to celebrate his “achievement” (the video has subsequently been taken down). In response, eBay and LiveWorld—the third-party software firm that operates eBay’s web-based forums—took the entire Trust and Security forum offline while they looked into the problem. The forum was taken down 90 minutes after the posts first hit the Web and was put back online later that day.
eBay issued an official statement on its eBay Chatter forum, stating that while the posts appeared to contain credit card information, the posted numbers did not correspond to credit card information that eBay had on file for those users. Nevertheless, the user names and contact information were accurate, and eBay claims they are attempting to get in contact by phone with each of the 1,200 users to ensure that they can protect themselves from any attempts at hijacking their accounts. At this time, eBay is unclear as to whether or not the accounts have been fully compromised. It is also not certain that only these 1,200 accounts are affected.
While the original posts and the YouTube video showing the list of names have been removed from the Web, an eBay member has grabbed as many of the account names as possible and posted them on a personal web site so that people can easily check to see if their account was one of the original 1,200. So far, the operator of this list has not been asked by eBay to take it down.
While this particular attack may not have revealed customers’ credit card information, there are plenty of fraudsters about who are trying their hardest to scam people out of their money: a helpful eBay forum member even posted a list of an astonishing 36 common scams currently being perpetrated against eBay users. Most of these involve social manipulation and phishing scams rather than direct attack, but clearly they are effective: videos of hacked accounts posting over 60,000 items for bid show what the bad guys are likely to do once they have your account information. It’s always a good idea to practice skeptical computing, but eBay users should take even greater care to ensure that they are not taken in by any of these scams.
An eBay representative did not return our request for a comment in time for publication.
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