A malware attack on the European Space Agency’s official web shop revealed that the application was hacked by loading a JavaScript script that generated a fake Stripe payment page at checkout. With an annual budget of more than 10 billion euros, the European Space Agency (ESA) is dedicated to extending the boundaries of space activity through the training of astronauts and the development of rockets and satellites for exploring our universe’s mysteries.
Thousands of people were put at risk of wire fraud after the European Space Agency (ESA) website was compromised due to the recent exploitation of a credit card skimmer, which was found to be malicious on ESA’s webshop. According to researchers from Sansec, the script creates a fake Stripe payment page when the customer is at checkout, which collects information from the customer.
As a result of the fake payment page being served directly from ESA’s web shop, which mimicked an authentic Stripe interface, it appeared authentic to unsuspecting users, who were unaware of the fraudulent payment process. According to Source Defense Research, screenshots of the malicious payment page were provided alongside the real one in the post, but this attack took advantage of domain spoofing with a different top-level domain to exploit domain spoofing, using a nearly identical domain name for the attack.