What is Carding? The Cybercrime Committed To Target Corporate Finances

Cyber attackers, target user accounts to gain access to financial credentials and commit financial fraud, monetary theft, digital extortion and target corporate economies. These attacks are not only politically motivated by of course are carried to fulfil, financial needs of cybercrime units, and are meant to fund their further malicious operations.

Also Read: 6 Ways To Prevent Credit Card Frauds

Cybercrime activity that is committed to stealing users’ financial information, hijacking payment gateways, and bypass online banking security is termed as Carding. Let’s know how cyber-attackers use carding as a medium to rip individual users and organizations of their hard-earned money.

Carding: From Credit Card Fraud to a Fully-Grown Account Hijacking Tactic

Earlier, Carding was limited to stealing credit card credentials and to use credit card limit for all sorts of unauthorized purchases. However, the term “carding” has now evolved into referencing major cyberattacks that hack into corporate networks to steal finances, which are then used to fund cybercriminal activities such as ransomware, as well as terrorist groups and drug trafficking cartels.

Moreover, Carding is also carried out by hackers to steal account details of individual users and corporate enterprises, and to use them to commit crimes associated with information abuse and identity theft.

How Hackers Carry Out Carding?

Carding can be carried out in several ways, and some of them remain unknown to the victims. This allows hackers to gain covert access to users details and commit fraud unbeknownst to both law enforcement and the targeted user.

Phishing is the most common way of hijacking information from accounts, whereby hackers tend to inject malware into target’s system by prompting them to download some malicious file. Once the malware is injected, hackers are able to gain access to users card details and passwords. Apart from that, various criminals mimic as bank officials and authorities and send spam emails to targets, asking for their credit card credentials. However, lately, internet security and firewalls have become capable of detecting spam and phishing attack. Especially, most of corporate accounts are secured by these firewalls to prevent hacking attacks. So, hackers have evolved the ways they use to carry out carding attacks. Rootkit malware and unauthorized takeover of accounts’ administration are the new choices of cybercriminals, whereby they tend to covertly surveillance your systems via controlling it from a command and control server. 

Most recently, a team of a Russian hacker group called EvaPiks used a version of TeamViewer application to gain access to multiple systems of the United States government. TeamViewer is often used by organizations to enable members to have remote access of their in-house systems for urgent information and file sharing. EvaPiks attached this software as a rootkit into a mail attachment and made officials install it in their systems. Once installed, the malicious TeamViewer provided the hackers remote access to the infected systems, costing the US government a lot of potential information.

What Can Be Done to Avoid Becoming A Victim Of Carding?

• Firstly, never leave cookies unattended and make sure you delete them at regular intervals and also, never leave your accounts logged in on your corporate or personal computer.

• Use Firewall Protection to make your remote access more secure. It would be more feasible to not use remote access applications at all.
• You are aware of this already, but again, do not share your passwords or log in credentials to anyone.

• Corporations should use CAPTCHA techniques before granting access to an account, which is associated with the corporate network.

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Carding is not just limited to card frauds anymore. Though the crime is purely financial in nature, one can never know the real motive of hackers behind carding attacks, which, in turn, may cause attacks aimed at causing further damage to property and human life. So, it’s important that carding is stopped and the necessary precautions are taken against it.