Have heard about the malware quite long time back but today I got a chance to study about it into one of the magazines (net-security.org). It's interesting, really amazing, a clever way to steal money from transactions without you sense anything suspicious happening.
Without going into technical details, this Man-In-The-Browser (MITB) Malware is known as 'URLZone'. In contrast to Man in the middle (MITM) attack where the communication is intercepted and changed in between client and server over the wire this MITB malware infects the client machine installs some exe's like unisntall02.exe on the client machine. It then sends back the ID to the Command and Control server that is used by the hacker.
How it works:
This is most interesting part which made me read the article till end.
It records for the requests which are going on POST and over https, which indicates that something valuable is being transferred.
When user makes the transaction the URLzone malware silently changes the recipients name with the hacker's name. All these can be defined into the configuration file of the malware.
The bank will see the request as genuine as the sessionID and other tokens will be valid and transfer the amount from the user to hacker's account.
Then it intercepts again the response from the bank and replace the hacker's name to the original recipient's name which the user/sender was expecting to see.
This is the brief overview of its functioning. For more you can refer to following magazine (reference):
http://www.net-security.org/dl/insecure/INSECURE-Mag-29.pdf
It's really interesting.
Without going into technical details, this Man-In-The-Browser (MITB) Malware is known as 'URLZone'. In contrast to Man in the middle (MITM) attack where the communication is intercepted and changed in between client and server over the wire this MITB malware infects the client machine installs some exe's like unisntall02.exe on the client machine. It then sends back the ID to the Command and Control server that is used by the hacker.
How it works:
This is most interesting part which made me read the article till end.
It records for the requests which are going on POST and over https, which indicates that something valuable is being transferred.
When user makes the transaction the URLzone malware silently changes the recipients name with the hacker's name. All these can be defined into the configuration file of the malware.
The bank will see the request as genuine as the sessionID and other tokens will be valid and transfer the amount from the user to hacker's account.
Then it intercepts again the response from the bank and replace the hacker's name to the original recipient's name which the user/sender was expecting to see.
This is the brief overview of its functioning. For more you can refer to following magazine (reference):
http://www.net-security.org/dl/insecure/INSECURE-Mag-29.pdf
It's really interesting.
Comments
But about malware i have one doubt here... banks are not so foolish to transfer money to other account directly they have NEFT and RTGS in place.
Manipulating account no may not work as todays internet banking of most of the banks have implemented a system to add the Payee (whom you are transfering the money)then the payee has to be confirmed by OTP (One time Password which is send by SMS or email)than only the transfer happens succesfully...
Wants your view on this... :)