Category Archives: A Little Sunshine

Includes investigative blog posts meant to shine a light on the darker corners of the Internet.

ZIP Codes Show Extent of Sally Beauty Breach

March 25, 2014
78 Comments

Earlier this month, beauty products chain Sally Beauty acknowledged that a hacker break-in compromised fewer than 25,000 customer credit and debit cards. My previous reporting indicated that the true size of the breach was at least ten times larger. While the number of cards known to be compromised so far pales in comparison to the 40 million cards exposed by the breach at some 1,800 Target locations, new analysis suggests that the Sally Beauty breach may have impacted far more stores –virtually all 2,600+ Sally Beauty locations nationwide.

Sources: Credit Card Breach at California DMV

March 22, 2014
140 Comments

The California Department of Motor Vehicles appears to have suffered a wide-ranging credit card data breach involving online payments for DMV-related services, according to banks in California and elsewhere that received alerts this week about compromised cards that all had been previously used at California DMV locations.

Are Credit Monitoring Services Worth It?

March 19, 2014
146 Comments

In the wake of one data breach after another, millions of Americans each year are offered credit monitoring services that promise to shield them from identity thieves. Although these services can help true victims step out from beneath the shadow of ID theft, the sad truth is that most services offer little in the way of real preventative protection against the fastest-growing crime in America.

The Long Tail of ColdFusion Fail

March 17, 2014
60 Comments

Earlier this month, I published a story about a criminal hacking gang using Adobe ColdFusion vulnerabilities to build a botnet of hacked e-commerce sites that were milked for customer credit card data. Today’s post examines the impact that this botnet has had on several businesses, as well as the important and costly lessons these companies learned from the intrusions.

Blogs of War: Don’t Be Cannon Fodder

March 13, 2014
52 Comments

On Wednesday, KrebsOnSecurity was hit with a fairly large attack which leveraged a feature in more than 42,000 blogs running the popular WordPress content management system (this blog runs on WordPress). This post is an effort to spread the word to other WordPress users to ensure their blogs aren’t used in attacks going forward.

Experian Lapse Allowed ID Theft Service Access to 200 Million Consumer Records

March 10, 2014
108 Comments

In October 2013, KrebsOnSecurity published an exclusive story detailing how a Vietnamese man running an online identity theft service bought personal and financial records on Americans directly from a company owned by Experian, one of the three major U.S. credit bureaus. Today’s story looks deeper at the damage wrought in this colossal misstep by one of the nation’s largest data brokers.