Russians created virus to steal banking credentials of Americans

Group-IB experts have found a new malicious program aimed at infection of POS-terminals and ATM-systems to steal payment card information from several US banks. Experts believe that the author of the virus is a scammer from Russia.

Malware named Dump Memory Grabber scans POS-terminals and ATMs for card credentials. The virus has already affected the clients of the major US banks, including Chase, Capital One, Citibank, and Union Bank of California.

“We have found one of the C&C servers for the following POS malware, but in fact hundreds of POS/ATMs were infected and we are still investigating this issue,” Andrey Komarov, head of international projects and CTO at CERT-GIB, told SecurityWeek.

Dump Memory Grabber hunts for banking credentials encoded into the magnetic stripe on the physical credit and debit card, and includes information such as the primary account number, first and last name, and expiration date. This information allows attackers to create fake cards.

The new virus is written in C + + without using another libraries. The virus adds itself to the registry, so it will run automatically when the system boots. Malware scans the list of processes running on the system.

Most cases of POS-terminals and ATMs infections, analyzed by Group-IB, where possible because of insiders help, such as the employees in charge of maintaining POS systems and authorized to update the software. POS-terminals running Windows XP or Windows Embedded with Remote Desktop or VNC software were infected remotely, and in some cases, attackers exploit vulnerabilities in the ATM network connected to the banks VPN or GSM/GPRS-networks.

All the stolen data is transmitted to a remote server via FTP. IP-address of the remote server is attached to the Russian supplier of Internet services Selectel, located in Moscow. In addition, the server is also associated with a domain name owned by a Russian company CISLAB.

The researchers suggest that the author of Dump Memory Grabber is a resident of the Russian Federation. He uses the name “Wagner Richard”. He is registered in the social network "VKontakte" under this name, and, in addition, takes orders for DDoS-attacks.

Group-IB provided the information about the detected malware to Visa, affected banks and U.S. law enforcement.