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Cyber Risks · Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks

The Year in Web Threats: Web Skimmers Take Advantage of Cloud Hosting and More

Summary: Unit 42's web threat detection module recorded 2,241,354 malicious landing URL incidents from October 2020 to September 2021, 831,550 of them unique URLs drawn from 51,985 unique domains. Web skimmers ranked third among observed threats behind cryptominers and JS downloaders, with 611,811 total URLs (147,907 unique) across 6,817 domains where skimmer code was injected, and some skimmer families hosted nearly half their code on cloud infrastructure.

Why it matters: Web skimmers are easy to deploy, hard to detect, and increasingly hosted on cloud domains that carry the legitimacy of real providers - for one family, cloud hosting grew over 50% from May to September. If your e-commerce checkout runs third-party JavaScript, the malware host and the landing page are typically on different domains, and that separation is exactly what makes the injection hard to see.

Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗

Topics
Malware
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