Is my webserver being abused for banking fraud?

Posted by koffie on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by koffie
Published on 2012-12-02T14:51:14Z Indexed on 2012/12/02 17:06 UTC
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Since a few weeks i'm getting a lot of 403 errors from apache in my log files that seem to be related to a bank frauding scheme.

The relevant log entries look like this (The ip 1.2.3.4 is one I made up, I did not modify the rest of each line)

www.bradesco.com.br:80 / 1.2.3.4 - - [01/Dec/2012:07:20:32 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 427 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11"
www.bb.com.br:80 / 1.2.3.4 - - [01/Dec/2012:07:20:32 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 370 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11"
www.santander.com.br:80 / 1.2.3.4 - - [01/Dec/2012:07:20:33 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 370 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11"
www.banese.com.br:80 / 1.2.3.4 - - [01/Dec/2012:07:20:33 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 370 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11"

the logformat I use is:

LogFormat "%V:%p %U %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\""

The strange thing is that all these domains are domains of banks and 3 out of the 4 domains are also in the list of the bank frauding scheme described on: http://www.abuse.ch/?p=2925

  1. I would really like to know if my server is being abused for bank frauding or not. I suspect not, because it's giving 403 to all requests. But any extra checks that I can do to ensure that my server is not being abused are welcome.

  2. I'm also curious on how the "bad guys" expected my server to behave. I.e. are they just expecting my server to act as a proxy to hide the ip of the fake site, or are they expecting that my server will actually serve the fake banking website?

  3. Is the ip 1.2.3.4 more likely to be the ip of a victim or the ip of a bad guy. I suspect a bad guy, because it's quite unlikely that a real person would visit 4 bank sites in a second. If it's from a bad guy I'm very curious at what he is trying to do.

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