Web skimming has been a major scourge for online shops over the past several years with attacks ranging from simple script injections into payment forms to sophisticated compromises of legitimate third-party scripts and services. Sometimes referred to as Magecart attacks, they have become the leading cause of card-not-present (CNP) fraud and have impacted small and big brands alike, as well as different types of ecommerce platforms.
As one of the top online retailers, Target started looking for solutions a few years ago to combat this threat and keep its own customers protected while shopping on its platform. Since there were no ready-made detection tools for such attacks at the time, two of the company’s security engineers decided to develop their own. After being in active use on Target.com for over three years, the company’s client-side scanner has now been released as an open-source project dubbed Merry Maker.