Formjacking on the rise in lead up to festive shopping period

Norton by Symantec has published new research about a major increase in formjacking attacks as Australians ramp up online shopping ahead of the festive season. 

Symantec has seen a major uptick in formjacking attacks recently, with publicly reported attacks on the websites of companies including Ticketmaster, British Airways, Feedify, and Newegg by a group called Magecart being the most notable examples. 

Formjacking is a term used to describe the use of malicious JavaScript to steal credit card details and other information on payment forms on the checkout web pages of e-commerce sites. 

When a customer of an e-commerce site submits their details into a websites payment form, malicious JavaScript code that has been injected there by cybercriminals collects all the entered information, such as payment card details and the users name and address. 

This information is then sent to the attackers servers. Attackers can then use this information to perform payment card fraud or sell these details to other criminals on the dark web.

According to Symantec, 248,000 formjacking attempts have been blocked since August 13. However, more than one third of these blocks have occurred in the past week, indicating that this activity is increasing, according to Symantec. 

Symantec recommends that website owners should be aware of the dangers of software supply chain attacks. Steps that website owners can take to protect against attacks include testing new updates in small test environments to detect any suspicious behaviour, and monitoring all activity on a system to help identify any unwanted patterns.