citytoohot.fr (malware)

What is citytoohot.fr ?

Often found on online stores, citytoohot.fr is a common digital skimmer (also known as Magecart) that was first detected on April 3rd, 2020. So far, Sansec has discovered this malware on 912 different victim stores. The most common attacked platform is Magento 2.

A typical sample of the malware in the wild can be observed when selecting "view page source" in your browser. It looks like this:

citytoohot.fr

How does it work?

The citytoohot.fr skimmer is loaded on the checkout page of a typical store. It lives in the browser of an unsuspecting online customer. Whenever he or she enters her payment information, the private data is siphoned off to an offshore server. Usually, this data is then sold on the dark web within 2-10 weeks.

Adobe released a fix for CVE-2022-24086 in February, 2022. A bug in the Magento template parser allows anyone to execute server-side code on an unpatched Magento store.

This issue started getting mass-exploited in late summer 2022, when exploit kits were offered for sale on dark web forums.

NB. The presence of this code in your database does NOT indicate a successful attack. However, you should really analyse your systems for indicators of a compromise.

How to clean it?

The malware can be easily removed. It is usually hidden in a database field, such as core_config_data, cms_blocks or cms_pages. Sometimes the malware is appended to a specific .js code file. However just cleaning the malware is not enough: you need to discover the root cause of this malware, otherwise you will soon find the same malware back in your store.