http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/46228-1.html
By William Jackson
GCN.com
05/06/08
Last month Researchers at online security company Finjan uncovered a 1.4
gigabyte cache of stolen data from North America, Europe, the Middle
East and India on a Malaysian server that provided command and control
functions for malware attacks in addition to being a drop site for data
harvested from compromised computers.
“This is a unique example of what we have been talking about for the
last year,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technical officer at Finjan.
Online thieves are using sophisticated tools to plant malicious code on
legitimate Web pages, compromising visiting PCs and stealing data.
The data included 5,388 unique log files collected in just a three-week
period. The files included personal and business e-mails, medical
records, and financial log-in and transaction information with not only
credit card and account numbers but also passwords and security codes.
Although the trend of using Web exploits to steal and market personal
data has been identified for some time, the discovery of the cache still
was an eye-opener, Ben-Itzhak said.
“When you see a server with the data there, it’s the difference between
theory and reality,” he said. “When you see people’s medical records and
e-mail in this volume, we were kind of shocked.”
Since the discovery in early April, the company’s Malicious Code
Research Center has discovered two similar servers in different parts
world with similar data. They appeared to have been in operation for
shorter periods of time.
Finjan reported the discovery today in the latest issue of the
“Malicious Page of the Month” bulletin [1].
The crimeserver was discovered by analysts monitoring outgoing traffic
from a Finjan customer’s network. Following the traffic to its
destination led them to the unprotected server holding the data. The
server contained several Trojans and the payload injected into
compromised Web sites in addition to command and control software for
the attacks and the stolen data.
“It was just waiting for someone to collect it,” Ben-Itzhak said. Most
of the data was in raw log files, although “in some parts of the server,
we found data that had already been processed.”
Finjan analysts needed a week to process the 1.4 gigabytes and determine
what was there. The log files were traced to 5,878 distinct IP
addresses. The number of compromised PCs the data was lifted from has
not been determined, but Ben-Itzhak said it could be as high as double
the number of IP addresses. Files on the server included 571 log files
from the United States, 621 from Germany, 322 from France, 308 from
India, 232 from Great Britain, 150 from Spain, 86 from Canada, 58 from
Italy, 46 from the Netherlands and 1,037 from Turkey.
The server was registered to a man from Moscow and was hosted in
Singapore at the time it was discovered. It has since been shut down.
“About every week he was moving the server,” from Russia to China, Hong
Kong and finally Singapore, Ben-Itzhak said.
In the online black market for stolen information, raw data can be sold
in bulk for $1,000 for about 100 megabytes, but individual credit card
numbers with accompanying information can sell for $20 to $50 each.
Other files can bring hundreds of dollars, depending on their contents.
Ben-Itzhak said the discovery illustrates the breadth of the data theft
threat. It is not just personal financial data at risk but corporate
data also. The files included information from what Finjan described as
40 top-tier global businesses and included sensitive corporate e-mails.
“We entered a new era in which criminals just need to log into their
‘data supplier’ and download any information suitable for them to
conduct their crime, be it financial fraud, industrial espionage or
identity theft,” Ben-Itzhak said.
The company notified more than 40 major international financial
institutions in the United States, Europe and India whose customers were
compromised in addition to international law enforcement agencies
including the FBI.
Ben-Itzhak said the largest financial institutions were not surprised,
but smaller banks were. Cooperation was good from law enforcement
agencies, with which the company maintains close relationships, he said.
[1] http://www.finjan.com/mpom
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