Sunday, June 18, 2006

Phishing scam uses PayPal secure servers

Fraudsters are exploiting the flaw to harvest personal details, including PayPal logins, Social Security numbers and credit card details, according to staff at Netcraft Ltd., an Internet services company in Bath, England. The PayPal site, owned by eBay, allows users to make online payments to one another, charged to their credit cards, and login credentials for the service are a prized target of fraudsters.

The attack works by tricking PayPal members into following a maliciously crafted link to a secure page on PayPal's site. Anyone thinking to check the site's security certificate at this point will see that it is a valid 256-bit certificate belonging to the site, Netcraft employee Paul Mutton wrote in the company's blog on Friday.

However, the URL exploits a flaw in PayPal's site that allows the fraudsters to inject some of their own code into the page that is returned, he wrote. In this case, the result is a warning that the user's account may have been compromised, and that they "will now be redirected to Resolution Center." The page to which they are redirected asks for their PayPal account details -- but thanks to the cross-site scripting flaw in the PayPal site, and the data injected into the URL by the fraudsters, the page is no longer on the PayPal site. Instead, the page steals the login details and sends them to the fraudsters' server, then prompts the user for other personal information, Mutton said.

The Web server harvesting the personal details is hosted in Korea, Mutton said.

The cross-site scripting technique makes the phishing attempt difficult to detect, said Mike Prettejohn, also of Netcraft.

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