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60,000 Credit Cards Numbers Stolen Online

Posted by timothy on from the send-your-number-here-to-check dept.

robl writes "140,000 credit card numbers were tested for validity yielding about 62,000 valid credit card numbers and $300,000 of fraudulent charges. A good quote: "There wasn't a system in place to say, 'you've generated 140,000 charges, that's more than your normal volume.'" As Schneier-heads would say, it's a brittle system -- when the security fails, it fails badly."

2 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Not as brittle as you think by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you'd read the article through, you would've seen that the merchant account was never credited with the $300K-plus authorized. The main worry is that now the criminals have a large number of valid card numbers; but all those numbers are on record and can be canceled, and new numbers issued. Transactions using those numbers can be traced.

    Admittedly the incident caused a lot of annoyance and no small expense for card issuers, and there are ways security could be improved, but in the end, the hack didn't cause a disaster.

  2. Re:Credit Card by NineNine · · Score: 5, Informative

    EVERYONE with a Visa or Mastercard has fraud protection. It's a federal law. You probably didn't know that, and were suckered into paying extra for it.