OWASP Anti-Malware Project - Awareness Program

Banking Malware Attack Process
The process involving Malware attack require the subsequent verification of each of the following steps to be successful. We consider an attack to be successful if the attacker obtain a financial gain from the initial client attack. The very steps (e.g. Infection of clients) usually do not involve the Banking infrastrucure, while others are tightly connected to it. Attackers absolutely need the functionalities offered by the hacked online bank accounts to do cash outs.

From user infection to cash out
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This is a chain of required steps. Attackers need to perform successfully each of these for turning the attack into a monetary gain. For this reason the process can be reasonably stopped at any level. As in other cases a defense in depth approach is suggested to be effective against the weakest link of each part of the attack.

Infection of clients and pcs

 * Exploitation of client side vulnerabilities (during internet browsing)
 * Spam (Infection delivered via Email)

Hiding The Infection and creating the Permanent threat

 * Packers
 * Modded Builds
 * Rootkit (and Bootkit)

Stealing of Auth credentials

 * KeyLogging and Form Grabbing
 * Video Grabbing
 * WebInjects

Storing of Auth credentials

 * Standard Dropzone
 * Fast Flux Based
 * Instant Messaging and P2P network

Hiding The Operations

 * Data Tunnelling
 * Modification of Contact Details
 * User Interface Restoring

Cashing Out

 * Money Transfer
 * Mobile Phone Charge
 * Pump and Dump

General strategy

 * Narrowing the attack surface
 * Identification
 * Blocking
 * Recovering

Containing the number of infected customers

 * Awareness (e.g. Remember to the users about Antivirus programs)
 * Check for software updates and potentially exposed customers (e.g. Plugin Update)

Unhide the Infection

 * Tell to your customers about the infections
 * Use systems for detecting compromised customers
 * Have in place a security response process

Counterfeat the Stealing of Auth credentials

 * Resilient Authentication
 * Invest in user Informative (e.g. SMS with Token and Transaction details)
 * Multi factor and Multi channel authentication

Against the Remote Storaging of Auth Credentials

 * Identification and Alerting about Dropzones
 * Browser Sand boxing
 * Dropzone security response

Reveal Malicious Operations

 * Track transaction anomalies (Protocols, Geo Location, Bot –Like Requests)
 * Establish a protected user informative (e.g. protecting phone numb. details update)
 * Detect UI modification

Against Cashing Out

 * Mule accounts monitoring
 * Get money back from other banks
 * Monitor and correlate sources for any disposal operation

Evaluate your organization
Your organization can be evaluated along the adoption of the countereasures described above and on the effort to mitigate each malware attack step