Embedding Malicious IFRAMEs Through Stolen FTP Accounts - Part Two

The practice of using stolen or data mined -- from a botnet's infected population -- FTP accounts is nothing new. In March, 2008, a tool originally published in February, 2007, got some publicity once details of stolen FTP accounts belonging to Fortune 500 companies were found in the wild. Interestingly, none of the companies were serving malicious iFrames on their compromised hosts back then.

Despite the fact that 2008 was clearly the year of the massive SQL injection attacks hitting everyone, everywhere, massive iFrame injection tools through stolen FTP accounts are still in development. Take for instance this very latest console/web interface based proprietary one currently offered for sale at $30.

Its main differentiation factors according to the author are the pre-verification of the accounting data in order to achieve better speed, advanced logs management and update feature allowing the malicious campaigner to easily introduce new iFrame at already iFrame-ED hosts through the compromised FTP accounts, and, of course, the what's turning into a commodity feature in the face of long-term customer support. In this case, that would be a hundred FTP accounting details to get the customers accustomed to the tool's features.

Interestingly, at least according to the massive SQL injections taking place during the entire 2008, iFrame-ing has reached its decline stage, at least as the traffic acqusition/abuse method of choice. And with SQL injections growing, this very same FTP account data is serving the needs of the blackhat search engine optimizers bargaining on the basis of a pagerank.