Jam and jelly maker Smucker’s last week shuttered its online store, notifying visitors that the site was being retooled because of a security breach that jeopardized customers’ credit card data. Closer examination of the attack suggests that the company was but one of several dozen firms — including at least one credit card processor — hacked last year by the same criminal gang that infiltrated some of the world’s biggest data brokers.
First American Bank in Illinois is urging residents and tourists alike to avoid paying for cab rides in Chicago with credit or debit cards, warning that an ongoing data breach seems to be connected with card processing systems used by a large number of taxis in the Windy City.
In response to rumors in the financial industry that Sears may be the latest retailer hit by hackers, the company said today it has no indications that it has been breached. Although the Sears investigation is ongoing, experts say there is a good chance the identification of Sears as a victim is a false alarm caused by a common weaknesses in banks’ anti-fraud systems that becomes apparent mainly in the wake of massive breaches like the one at Target late last year.
Last year’s breach at Target Corp. flooded underground markets with millions of stolen credit and debit cards. In the days surrounding the breach disclosure, the cards carried unusually high price tags — in large part because few banks had gotten around to canceling any of them yet. Today, two months after the breach, the number of unsold stolen cards that haven’t been cancelled by issuing banks is rapidly shrinking, forcing the miscreants behind this historic heist to unload huge volumes of cards onto underground markets and at cut-rate prices.
Today’s New York Times features a profile of this author — a story titled, “Reporting from the Web’s Underbelly”. The piece, written by The Times’s Silicon Valley reporter Nicole Perlroth, observes:
Mr. Krebs, 41, tries to write pieces that cannot be found elsewhere. His widely read cybersecurity blog, Krebs on Security, covers a particularly dark corner of the Internet: profit-seeking cybercriminals, many based in Eastern Europe, who make billions off pharmaceutical sales, malware, spam, frauds and heists like the recent ones that Mr. Krebs was first to uncover at Adobe, Target and Neiman Marcus….
KrebsOnSecurity has been targeted by countless denial-of-service attacks intended to knock it offline. Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity was hit by easily the most massive and intense such attack yet — a nearly 200 Gpbs assault leverging a simple attack method that industry experts is becoming alarmingly common.
The breach at Target Corp. that exposed credit card and personal data on more than 110 million consumers appears to have begun with a malware-laced email phishing attack sent to employees at an HVAC firm that did business with the nationwide retailer, according to sources close to the investigation.
State authorities in Florida on Thursday announced criminal charges targeting three men who allegedly ran illegal businesses moving large amounts of cash in and out of the Bitcoin virtual currency. Experts say this is the first case in which Bitcoin vendors have been prosecuted under state anti-money laundering laws, and that prosecutions like these could smother one of the last remaining avenues for purchasing Bitcoins anonymously.
Last week, Target told reporters at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters that the initial intrusion into its systems was traced back to network credentials that were stolen from a third party vendor. Sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the vendor in question was a refrigeration, heating and air conditioning subcontractor that has worked at a number of locations at Target and other top retailers.
Adobe Systems Inc. is urging users of its Flash Player software to upgrade to a newer version released today. The company warns that an exploit targeting a previously unknown and critical Flash security vulnerability exists in the wild, and that this flaw allows attackers to take complete control over affected systems.
