NRSC hack – financial data of donors were sent to a Russian domain

NRSC hack – A platform used by the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the donations was hacked and donors’ financial data have been exposed.

Other rumors around the Presidential Election, once again, it’s a hacking story in the headlines, the NRSC hack. Donations sent to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) between March 16 and October 5, 2016 on a certain platform, have been compromised. The attackers used a malware that was specifically designed to steal credit card data and personal information.

People that made donations after October 6, 2016, haven’t been impacted because the NRSC once discovered the attack quickly solved the situation.

The malware-based attack was first discovered by the Dutch expert Willem de Groot. According to de Groot who analyzed the traffic on the platform, hackers roughly accessed data related to 3,500 transactions per month.

“I do not know how many credit cards were stolen from the Republican store but I can make an educated guess. According to TrafficEstimates, the Republican store has received some 350K visits per month lately. A conservative conversion ratio of 1% yields 3500 stolen credit cards per month, or 21K stolen credits cards since March. Black market value per card is between $4 and $120, so I assume a modest $30 per card. The villains could have made roughly $600K on this store alone.” wrote Willem de Groot.

Hackers accessed data related NRSC transactions conducted through the compromised platform, exposed records include the donor’s first name, last name, email address, billing details (address, city, state, and zip code), employer details, occupation, card type, card number, card expiration, and security code.The experts who worked on the case discovered that stolen information was sent to two Russian domains. A further analysis revealed that hackers sent data to jquery-cloud[.]net earlier this year, but later they switched to the jquery-code[.]su.

The jquery-code[.]su domain is still active and is operated by Dataflow, the same network also hosts domains used by other groups involved in criminal activities.

“Dataflow has a very small network of just 2 blocks (512 IPs) and you can look upwhat else runs on that network. Its owners deserve praise for collecting about every kind of online fraud known to man: money laundering, synthetic drug trade, darknet messaging, phishing and spam.”

Below a video PoC of the NRSC hack:

At the time I was writing the there is no data breach notification of the official NRSC website.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – NRSC hack, 2016 Political Election)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.