Slashdot Mirror
Phishing Group Caught Stealing From Other Phishers
An anonymous reader writes "Netcraft has written about a website offering free phishing kits with one ironic twist — they all contain backdoors to steal stolen credentials from the fraudsters that deploy them.
Deliberately deceptive code inside the kits means that script kiddies are unlikely to realize that any captured credit card numbers also end up getting sent to the people who made the phishing kits. The same group was also responsible for another backdoored phishing kit used against Bank of America earlier this month."
But seriously, this is good news! It is always good news (for law-abiding people) when crooks start feeding off each other.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Except they are actually double feeding off innocent people.... some poor chap's info gets stolen by both the guy who deployed the phishing kit and the guy who wrote it.... which means its probably at least twice as likely to get used for fraud.
.. you just can't trust malware anymore!
Really though, this is nothing new. IIRC, some builds of Sub7 had a reverse backdoor (not covered in the wiki article), as well as a master password that let the Sub7 crew take over a server (covered by the wiki article), and some builds even included hard drive killer when the master password was in use.
Don't you ever wonder why there have been so few significant arrests of spammers/phishers/etc?
Isn't it trivial for a government agency like the FBI or Treasury to track payments charged to any kind of electronic banking back to the recipient? Wouldn't an investigation "following the money" ultimately lead you to either the thief or at least greatly disrupt his activities? At a minimum it would expose the people that made their transactions work (banks, hosting companies, other otherwise "normal" business people).
A couple of decent RICO prosecutions and you would drive this stuff out of the United States and greatly reduce the scale of it.
But it never happens, and I can only think that somehow the government has somehow turned these people into some espionage rabbit hole and high level prosecutions would disrupt intelligence gathering. Because there is little reason the government couldn't do something about it if they wanted to.
It's amazing how many large websites are so vulnerable to even basic attacks. SQL Injection is still rampant (a simple well devised Google search can show you that) and many corporations leave credit card numbers unencrypted. Somebody with basic knowledge of SQL could attack a large amount of organizations without any trouble. I've seen this happen to too many people for me to ever trust important information on smaller sites.
This is pretty much the correct usage.
From Wikipedia:
In hacker culture, a script kiddie (occasionally script bunny, skidie, script kitty, script-running juvenile (SRJ), or similar) is a derogatory term used for an inexperienced malicious cracker who uses programs developed by others to attack computer systems, and deface websites. It is generally assumed that script kiddies are kids who lack the ability to write sophisticated hacking programs on their own,[1] and that their objective is to try to impress their friends or gain credit in underground cracker communities.
And that's exactly what's happening.
One of my ATM cards has 2 different pin numbers. If I use the alternative one, the transaction is completed normally (so no one on the spot gets wiser), but the institution will flag it and notify the police at once, providing my identity and location. I have to pay a little extra for eat (about US$ 3/month), but it is well worth it. It is considered (and marketed as) an insurance. I have this since 1996, and I'm happy to say I never needed.
So yes, the banks know this kind of thing can be done. I wonder why other institutions don't do it or even why this is not mandatory for all cards.
I really don't mind the extra US$ 3/month for this service.
morcego