Hackers have breached the infrastructure of Volusion, a provider of cloud-hosted online stores, and are delivering malicious code that records and steals payment card details entered by users in online forms.
More than 6,500 stores are impacted, but the number could be even higher. In a press release published last month, Volusion claimed it had more than 20,000 customers. The most notable compromise is the Sesame Street Live online store, which has been taken down earlier today after another journalist reached out. At the time of writing, the malicious code is still on Volusion’s servers and is still being delivered to all of the company’s client stores.
Hackers breach Volusion, a cloud-based provider of online stores, to collect card details from thousands of site
—up to 6.5k stores impacted (including Sesame Street online store)
—hackers altered a JS file hosted on the company's Google Cloud accounthttps://t.co/UTOZZ9Af0O pic.twitter.com/DpR85XaZe3
— Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) October 8, 2019
Experts have commented on the breach below:
The times of “we are just a small store – hackers won’t target us” are over. Payment card details are extremely valuable data sets as fraud is easy to commit with stolen card information. When hackers are able to breach cloud-based platforms – like Volusion in this case – they gain access to a huge amount of data sets by targeting hundreds of stores with a single attack.
Thousands of organizations have offloaded the work and the risk for processing eCommerce transactions to third parties like Volusion. The concentration of credit card data in one place makes for an attractive target.
Data shows that since the introduction of EMV or chip cards, fraud has actively moved from card-present to card-not-present, or from the point of sale systems to online eCommerce. We’ve made it harder, though not impossible, to create counterfeit cards, and criminals have shifted their attention to easier avenues of attack.
Compromising the supply chain is a common tactic used by many attackers. We\’ve seen many attacks over the years that look to inject malicious code into trusted settings, such as into mobile phone App stores, WordPress plugins, or other widgets. This attack against Volusion follows the same methodology where by compromising the infrastructure, all underlying sites and users become vulnerable.
It\’s unclear how the Google services of Volusion were compromised, but it reinforces the fact that no type of company is immune from attacks and therefore need to ensure security is embedded throughout the culture of every company.