It seems that credit card theft services are getting increasingly popular, and among them, one of the new in the market that is gaining massive popularity, is Caramel Skimmer. 

The increasing popularity of such services may imply that low-skilled fraudulent actors will have easy and automated access to banking services in the future.

A credit card skimmer is a malicious script placed on a hacked e-com website that silently waits for a customer to purchase and put in credit card numbers and other details.

The credit card information is stolen once a transaction has been made and sent to remote servers to be collected by malicious actors once the transaction has been completed.

These stolen credit cards are then used to make their own online purchases or sold on dark web marketplaces for a few dollars to other threat actors. 

Caramel Skimmer

Domain Tools has identified the new service as operated by the Russian cybercrime organization CaramelCorp, which it identifies as the operator of the platform.

Subscribers of this service will benefit from the following facilities and things to launch their own campaign against the theft of credit cards:- 

• A skimmer script
• Deployment instructions
• A campaign management panel

During its initial vetting process, Caramel staff excludes any threat actors using machine translation or having no experience in this field from receiving its service, which is only available to Russian-speaking threat actors.

In addition to that, it has been claimed that the Caramel skimmer has been developed by more than one developer.

The cost of a lifetime subscription for this service is $2,000, which is considerably more than some young threat actors can afford.

In response, they promise to provide the following facilities to the Russian-speaking hackers:-

• Full customer support
• Code upgrades
• Evolving anti-detection measures

According to the sellers, Caramel is able to bypass the protection services from Cloudflare, Akamai, Incapsula, and other companies. However, all these claims haven’t been proven to be true.

While an introductory guide to JavaScript that shows buyers how to use it in specific content management systems is given.

Credit card data collection

Caramel makes sure its subscribers are protected against credit card skimming attempts by using several different means of obfuscation, as the scripts are written in JavaScript.

During the collection of credit card information, the data is exfiltrated between specified periods of time, via the use of the “setInterval()” method. 

In the campaign administration panel, the subscriber can monitor the compromised e-shops, manage the gateways for receiving the stolen data, and so forth.

Caramel has managed to cultivate a strong following within the underground community through continual development and promotion.

Recommendation

Having access to such skimming services as Caramel and others of this kind eliminates a major technical barrier to setting up a skimming service of this kind.

Increasing the number of card skimming campaigns and operating them on an enormous scale may result in an increased prevalence of skimmer attacks.

In order to protect yourself and your customers from the risk of credit card skimmers, you should install a credit card security solution on your e-commerce platform, and even you can also follow the precautions that we have mentioned below:-

• One-time private cards
• Setting up charging limits 
• Set-up charging restrictions
• Use online payment systems instead of cards

You can follow us on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook for daily Cybersecurity and hacking news updates.