8,700 FTP server credentials in the hands of hackers

A database has been uncovered containing more than 8,700 harvested FTP account credentials, including username, password and server address - in the hands of hackers.

Finjan, which made the announcement, said the stolen accounts include those of Fortune-level global companies in a wide range of industries including manufacturing, telecom, media, online retail, IT, as well as government agencies.

The security firm added that the stolen FTP accounts include some of the world’s top 100 domains as ranked by Alexa.com.

Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Center (MCRC) has detailed the workings of an insidious new application, especially designed to abuse and trade stolen FTP account credentials of legitimate companies around the world.

“Stolen accounts include those of Fortune-level global companies in a wide range of industries.

A trading interface is used to qualify the stolen accounts in terms of country of residence of the FTP server and Google page ranking of the compromised server. This information enables the cybercriminals to devise cost for the compromised FTP credentials for resale to other cybercriminals or to adjust the attack on more prominent sites. The trading application also allows the cybercriminal to manage FTP credential information to automatically inject IFRAME tags to web pages on the compromised server.

“Software-as-a-Service has been evolving for sometime, but until now, it has been applied only to legitimate applications. With this new trading application, cybercriminals have an instant ‘solution’ to their ‘problem’ of gaining access to FTP credentials and thus infecting both the legitimate websites and its unsuspecting visitors. All of this can be easily achieved with just one push of a button,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of Finjan.

According to Finjan, the NeoSploit 2 toolkit marks a serious escalation of Crimeware potential, since it uses the Software-as-a-Service business model.