Last week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news of an ongoing credit card breach involving CiCi’s Pizza, a restaurant chain in the United States with more than 500 locations. What follows is an exclusive look at a point-of-sale botnet that appears to have enslaved dozens of hacked payment terminals inside of CiCi’s locations that are being relieved of customer credit card data in real time.
In the wake of megabreaches at some of the Internet’s most-recognized destinations, don’t be surprised if you receive password reset requests from numerous companies that didn’t experience a breach: Some big name companies — including Facebook and Netflix — are in the habit of combing through huge data leak troves for credentials that match those of their customers and then forcing a password reset for those users.
CiCi’s Pizza, an American fast food business based in Coppell, Texas with more than 500 stores in 35 states, appears to be the latest restaurant chain to struggle with a credit card breach. It appears that hackers obtained access to card data at affected restaurants by posing as technical support specialists for the company’s point-of-sale provider, and that multiple retailers have been targeted by this cybercrime gang.
Last week, LifeLock and several other identity theft protection firms erroneously alerted their customers to a breach at cloud storage giant Dropbox.com — an incident that reportedly exposed some 73 million usernames and passwords. The only problem with that notification was that Dropbox didn’t have a breach; the data appears instead to have come from another breach revealed this week at social network Tumblr.
On March 14, 2013 our humble home in Annandale, Va. was “swatted” — that is to say, surrounded by a heavily-armed police force that was responding to fraudulent reports of a hostage situation at our residence. Later this month the government will sentence 21-year-old hacker named Mir Islam for that stunt and for leading a criminal conspiracy allegedly engaged in a pattern of swatting, identity theft and wire fraud.
