Cards stolen in a recent data breach at retail giant Target have been flooding underground black markets in recent weeks, selling in batches of one million cards and going for anywhere from $20 to more than $100 per card, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
There are 1,001 ways to swindle people online, but the hardest part for crooks is converting those ill-gotten gains into cash. A new service catering to purveyors of ransomware — malware that hijacks PCs until victims pay a ransom – levees a hefty fee for laundering funds from these scams, and it does so by abusing a legitimate Web site that allows betting on dog and horse races in the United States.
Researchers in the United Kingdom say they’ve discovered mounting evidence that thieves have been quietly exploiting design flaws in a security system widely used in Europe to prevent credit and debit card fraud at cash machines and point-of-sale devices.
The data breach at Atlanta-based credit and debit card processor Global Payments just keeps getting bigger. Earlier this month, I reported that Visa and MasterCard were alerting banks that the breach extended back to June 2011. Now it appears the… Read More »
Debit card accounts stolen in a recent hacker break-in at card processor Global Payments have been showing up in fraud incidents at retailers in Las Vegas and elsewhere, according to officials from one bank impacted by the fraud.
At the beginning of March 2012, Danbury, Conn. based Union Savings Bank began seeing an unusual pattern of fraud on a dozen or so debit cards it had issued, noting that most of the cards had recently been used at a cafe at a nearby private school. When the bank determined that the school was a customer of Global Payments, it contacted Visa to alert the card association of a possible breach at the Atlanta-based processor, according to Doug Fuller, Union Savings Bank’s chief risk officer.
Global Payments, the credit and debit card processor that disclosed a breach of its systems late Friday, said in a statement late Sunday that the incident involved at least 1.5 million accounts. The news comes hours ahead of planned conference call with investors, and after Visa said it had pulled its seal of approval for the company.
In a press release issued 9:30 Sunday evening, Atlanta based Global Payments Inc. said it believes “the affected portion of its processing system is confined to North America and less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported…Based on the forensic analysis to date, network monitoring and additional security measures, the company believes that this incident is contained. ”
VISA and MasterCard are alerting banks across the country about a recent major breach at a U.S.-based credit card processor. Sources in the financial sector are calling the breach “massive,” and say it may involve more than 10 million compromised card numbers.
Underground Web sites can be a useful barometer for the daily volume of criminal trade in goods like stolen credit card numbers and hijacked PayPal or eBay accounts. And if the current low prices at one of Underweb’s newer and… Read More »
Recently leaked online chat records may provide the closest look yet at a Russian man awaiting trial in Wisconsin on charges of running a cybercrime machine once responsible for sending between 30 to 40 percent of the world’s junk email.
Criminals who operate large groupings of hacked PCs tend to be a secretive lot, and jealously guard their assets against hijacking by other crooks. But one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated botnets is openly renting its infected PCs to any and all comers, and has even created a Firefox add-on to assist customers.
