In 2018, over 4800 websites were compromised by formjacking attacks, further 3.7 million attacks were blocked. Major corporations like British Airways have fallen victim to a formjacking attack.
While this form of cyberattack was not well-known in the past, they have quickly become the preferred way of exploitation amongst cybercriminals due to the difficulty to detect the occurrence of an attack.
Moreover, with the increasing online traffic and the digitalisation of the supply chain, we can expect these cyberattacks to be far more frequent. This is a major cause for concern because it puts your customers at risk and undermines your business credibility.
Even if your cybersecurity infrastructure is efficient in blocking these forms of cyberattacks, any vulnerability in the networks of your vendors can be exploited by cybercriminals to access your website data.
In fact, this is how many websites fell victim to formjacking recently. Most of them were using Magneto for payment processing, which was compromised by several groups of cybercriminals that were collectively known as Magecart attacks.
The good news is that you can protect your critical data and thwart any formjacking attack on your network by adopting robust, agile, and effective cybersecurity measures.
Effective measures for preventing formjacking attacks
- Addressing JavaScript issues in your web browser
Given that Magecart attacks are exploited technical weaknesses in Javascript, addressing these issues is critical for preventing such attacks in the future.
You can use JavaScript proxying, which allows your team to overwrite JS prototypes and decide if you want to allow them or not based on the actual value in the field.
Furthermore, real-time JavaScript sandboxing can be leveraged to isolate external resources from the page. This is critical for preventing these attacks given that most of them are initiated by outsiders injecting malicious code into Javascript.
- Use effective intrusion detection techniques
Intrusion Detection and Prevention systems (IDP) allows you to monitor network traffic for any indicators of an attack and alert site administrators if an attack is detected.
The way these systems work is by monitoring a website’s code, which could hold traces of malicious code that has been added to your website and then alert your cybersecurity team, allowing them to take the necessary steps to prevent an escalation of the attack.
- Establish a content security policy
You can thwart formjacking attack by creating a list of scripts that can block malicious code from being loaded from remote locations and prevent unauthorised third parties from adding their code.
Also, HTTP directives such as Content Security Policy (CSP) and Subresource Integrity (SRI) can place restrictions on the type of scripts that can be loaded and from where they can be loaded, allowing you to ensure the security of your website.
- Monitor your supply chain
Given that your website can be compromised through vulnerabilities in your vendors’ networks, it is best to improve security across your supply chain.
This requires better attack surface management, so you have better oversight into who has access to your website data, improving your chances of identifying formjacking attempts and implementing remediation techniques.
Furthermore, you should also ensure that all your vendors are using the most secure, up-to-date technology when handling your data.
In addition, you should regularly audit your vendors and analyse their cybersecurity posture before onboarding them.
Here, a vendor risk rating solution can give you a complete breakdown of their security capabilities by identifying potential cyber risks.
Protecting your business from formjacking attacks
Today, formjacking attacks are posing a far bigger threat to websites than they have had in the past.
Preventing such attacks will be critical in the future because we can expect cybercriminals to resort to this tactic more often. After all, they are lured by the prospect of a subtle attack that can bypass conventional cybersecurity defences.
However, investing in effective defences can reduce the likelihood of these attacks and ensure that your data remains secure and your customers stay safe.