Something I don't get about this -

Many small retailers (think Quickie-Mart) or other owner-operated
stores, and certainly an increasing number of homes have sub-$200 4 and
8 camera surveillence systems that run some version of linux and can be
accessible through a lan connection and can be made accessible remotely
through port-forwarding.

And certainly MANY homes will have simple IP-cameras that their owners
have made remotely accessible to their cell phones though
port-forwarding (using typical ports, like 80 or 8080, etc).

So I don't see the point for black hats that have taken control of an
inside computer and start looking around for IP cameras as s sign that
they've infiltrated some MAJOR RETAILER (think Target, Walmart, etc)
because they'll likely find web-enabled cameras on any lan they have
access to.

And besides - I thought that major retailers had separate high-bandwidth
networks installed / operated by dedicated surveillence companies,
sometimes using custom equipment (non-IP) feeding video in real time to
remote viewers through private CATV channels.

=====================================================

Backoff Malware Validates Targets Through Infected IP Cameras

12/23/2014

RSA report on Backoff dives deeper into clues about the POS software and
hints at attackers potentially located in India.

As retailers are in the grips of the last few shopping days of
Christmas, they may not even know that cyber criminals quite literally
have their eyes on their stores. A new report out this week from RSA
Research Group about the POS malware Backoff postulates that the black
hats may actually be targeting retail machines by validating they belong
to a store through infections of IP-enabled surveillance cameras.

https://blogs.rsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/point-of-sale-malware-backoff.
pdf

Earlier this summer, US-CERT widely warned businesses that Backoff,
which at the time it said was "largely undetected by AV vendors," was
infecting point-of-sale systems through brute force attacks against
remote desktop software.

https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-212A

"While this may be true, it still doesn't explain the whole picture due
to a critical missing detail -- how were they able to determine if a
target computer belongs to a business or a store?" RSA researchers
wrote.

In the ensuing months, these researchers have been collecting data about
Backoff and through that work surmise that the attackers likely needed
to come up with a technique to figure out "whether a targeted IP
actually belongs to a business and not just an RDP (Remote Desktop)
service open on a personal computer" and which would "allow them to
operate on a large scale." One correlation they found was that a large
number of Backoff attacks seemed to be paired with the exposure of
camera surveillance services. They believe this was no coincidence.

"Our assumption is that the fraudsters figured out that the combination
of RDP service and cam surveillance service both exposed to the internet
provides a fairly logical indication of a possible business, and
therefore a proper target," the report said.

RSA also questioned whether the use of brute force on RDP services
really is the main intrusion technique by these Backoff attacks.

"According to our observations regarding the compromised machines, we
can say that it's very likely that additional techniques have been
employed, such as guessing default passwords for routers and cam
surveillance control panels, and using known exploits against these
service," they explained.

In addition to this added insight about Backoff attack techniques, RSA's
researchers also took a stab at attribution in the report. Two pieces of
data led them to believe that the source of Backoff may be located
somewhere in India. First, they were able to trace requests from someone
accessing the malware's C&C control panel. While the IP address of the
request came from a hosting server in the Netherlands, the user's
browser was set to India Standard Time.

Meanwhile, while looking into various Backoff samples, they ran into a
sample submitted to VirusTotal that wasn't packed that looked to be
"freshly created and output from the compiler." They guessed that it
very well could have been submitted by the malware's author for AV
testing purposes, but the sample allowed them to examine the binary and
determine its origins to be from India.
--- NewsGate v1.0 gamma 2