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TJX Breach Began With WEP Crack
An anonymous reader sends us to the Wall Street Journal for a detailed report on what is known to date about the TJX data breach. It seems that the loss of over 45 million credit card numbers and more than 450,000 SSNs, driver's license numbers, and military identifications began with someone using a "telescope-shaped" antenna at a wireless link at a Marshall's near St. Paul, Minnesota in July 2005. The link was encrypted using WEP, which had been known to be broken since 2001. The crackers who got into the TJX central databases are believed to be Romanians or Russians with ties to the Russian mobs. The eventual cost of the TXJ fiasco could exceed $1 billion — not including the numerous lawsuits filed against the retailer.
WEP is seriously flawed. What hasn't it been recalled and all router manufacturers forced to replace the hardware (or firmware)?
In most industries if you ship such a flawed product, the manufacturer has some liability. They are still selling them today too.
Of course shame on TJ Max and the whole handling of this fiasco. Not that I ever did previously, but I would never shop there.
TFA says "A person familiar with the firm's internal investigation says they may have grabbed as many as 200 million card numbers all told from four years' records."
Gets better, doesn't it?
So, as someone who had at least their CC number stolen thanks to these ass hats, when can we sue them and take a major chunk out of their ass? People in TJX should be jailed...
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
TJX - commonly known to American consumers as TJ Max and Marshalls retail stores. If you made purchases at these stores, you could be affected.
Fortunately, the mobsters only used a telescope shaped device to improve their range.
Imagine if they had known enough to make a satellite dish, of sorts...
After calming me down with some orange slices and some fetal spooning, E.T. revealed to me his singular purpose.
Which brings us to the question of why a major retailler is using wireless in the first place. I'm personally no more than an interested amatur, but I've read professionals running corperate networks who, if they have to include a wireless component at all, keep it completely seperate from the secure, WIRED, network. You get internet access, but no accessing the company databases from the wireless. Can anyone come up with a scenario where it would be ESSENTIAL for store operations to be able to send SSNs and drivers license #s over a wireless connection?
It's ironic really. Many thought it might be some insider job, a complicated back door, some flaw in an internet facing system - but no. The company was daft enough to put their internal data over a network that is explicitly designed to get around physical barriers to access, and no one, and I mean no one, seems to understand this.
A friend of mine has a reasonable but small IT business in the UK, and recently he started pushing the wireless expertise side - setting up wireless networks, explaining why they are a bigger risk than a wired network, securing them (and what do do if you are really paranoid) and trying to guarantee QoS more by setting it up correctly. Positioning your access points properly, doing wireless scanning to pick out any interference spots etc.
No one is interested, and I don't just mean small businesses, but some quite large companies who should know an awful lot better. It's not a UK thing either, because most people believe setting up a wireless network is about popping down to the local store, picking up a Netgear, switching it on and letting Windows attach you to the nearest wireless network it can find. Astonishing.
The only thing that shocks me is that this doesn't happen all the time, because many networks are just an open invitation. I mean OK, it's not that easy because you have to watch the network traffic and find out where the useful juicy bits of data are. That isn't completely straightforward, but once you are inside an average company's network it's doable because everything tends to act as if it is safe and fenced off.
WEP comprimised the communication of one retail store. Apparently enough information was stored in that one store to compromise a database with 4 years of records. So, an inside job at that level (assistant cashier probably had enough access to their wires) would be trivial. A better question... why would 4 years of CC number, etc. be accessible over the internet at all. Why not have that server offline, with updates posted occassionally via sneakernet? And hash the CC numbers. And otherwise, protect consumer information.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Well, we all know how brilliant data security experts are, and I really hope that sentence doesn't mean that they are simply throwing $5 million at them. You know what consultants are like - give them enough money and they will tell you everything you want to hear, even if the reality is a horror show.
The whole bloody point of this is that you don't get to that point in the first place. Stable door, horse bolted?
What the hell were they using this wireless network for?
So they were using an unsecured wireless network to enable hand-held equipment to function - and they used this to run their day-to-day business?! Christ. At first I thought this was just some wireless network someone had plugged into the network somewhere arbitrarily, not something they actually used in day-to-day operations.
I'm not 100% sure what system is used for credit card purchases in the US now, but this highlights why I like using cash a bit more with the advent of chip and pin. I would also never, ever use a debit card in one of these things. You transmit your card details, and the pin as well. Brilliant. Access to your bank account, and that hard earned pay that just went in today. I'm slightly confused though, because surely this communication with banks would all happen on another network?
So you take no responsibility for your own systems, and you have no internal expertise? Wonderful.
That's probably the only way, because some companies simply believe they don't have to take responsibility for IT, data, security and especially wireless security. It's something that is best swept under the carpet, and setting up a wireless network is as easy as spending a bit of money on a little access point you've seen at a local store, right? Why spend money doing it properly?
And shareholder's data. Make a law that puts the money-grubbing CEO and other officer's data in the databases with the customer's data. Then sit back and see what kind of directives management gives to their IT departments to secure data, networks, and workstations. But put their personal data to the same risk as what they deem is sufficient for all the people they don't know or care about. Then see how responsible they get.
I run a small business and this is exactly how the credit card transactions take place. A customer comes in to the store and purchases something and wishes to use their credit card - the card is swiped through a terminal that uses a dial-up modem connection back to the bank's clearing house - a conversation takes place between the terminal and the remote server (at a mighty 9600bps) - and either a "approved" or "declined" is returned and a *PAPER* receipt (2 part) is thermally printed. The customer gets one copy of that and one copy of the register receipt. I keep one copy of the register receipt for proof of what they purchased, along with the signed copy of their purchase. The credit card companies (Visa/MC/Am Ex) all require I keep those paper records for 1 year in case of charge backs, etc. Each evening when the business closes the paper receipts are collected and put in a manilla envelope marked with the day's date and the envelope is placed in a locked filing cabinet in the back office. At the beginning of each month, credit card purchase receipts more than 1 year past are burned in the incinerator - the filing cabinet never has more than 12 past months data, and none if it is stored in electronic format anywhere on premise. The point of sale software's database has a record of all transactions ever taken place as far as inventory, amount paid, taxes collected - but it has nothing that can tie the purchase to a customer or that customer's financial information. I don't see why any size business of any type couldn't follow that method of doing business.
(the following is speculation. TJMaxx, don't sue me, I'm not claiming to know what really went on, or real details of your network. This is just my impression from reading the story)
Yes, WEP is insecure for real stuff. It's like the little latch on a high school display case. It's to keep honest people honest. It shouldn't be used in a commercial network as the only encryption.
But what the heck kind of network design allows IPs from local stores direct access to central databases? The big issue here isn't that a few dozen or hundreds of cards were snagged by being sent through WEP -- we don't know, maybe the company ran a tunnel across that WEP link for those transactions, and they didn't get anything locally. The big issue is that it looks like the company was storing historical data on transactions online, and in databases that apparently were accessible from that link. WEP was a weak entry point to the network. But where was the security inside the network?
It sounds like possibly either the designers of the overall network hadn't limited access sufficiently to just IPs/MACs from their account department, on a secure network, or the hackers managed to break through security layers in between, perhaps by knocking over a server that was straddling networks or something. If they designed in layers, with firewalls as gatekeepers between layers and IDS and IPS monitoring, I don't think they would have servers straddling, to start. IDS and IPS would also help them notice, for example, if someone spoofed an email from a store to an accounting department person, included a trojan, and attempted to gain access that way.
I'm saying this not so much just to point out what sound like potential design issues with this company's networks, but to get people thinking about their own networks, instead of blowing this off as a WEP issue. If you administer a small network, and haven't had training on how to set it up and maintain it securely, you ought to look into Cisco's SAFE blueprint at bare minimum. It's free and the lessons can be applied to almost any brand of networking gear out there. It basically builds the network up from modules, which are easy to figure out. If you're administering a large network, well, as someone with CCSP training, I'd suggest you hire someone who's been properly trained, obviously. Cisco's track or someone else's. At the very least, everyone should consider thinking in terms of layers, like an onion, and discreet modules residing in, but not crossing, those layers. You should be really wary of any packets from across any WAN link to your core systems, obviously, but you should also set up security policies so that you know which administrative departments have access to which internal networks, too. Ask yourself, if an attacker can get into my network, what can he or she do?
One last thing: network security can't just be set up and left. It has to be monitored and maintained, both to respond to immediate attacks, and to see when people are just poking around, doing reconnaissance.
Get off my launchpad!
pre-emptively changed my Visa card number a couple months before this became public. I found out that I was not affected by this break-in later, so I'm unsure whether or not it was in response to
The question in my mind is, given the basic vulnerability of a long-term CC number, why they don't move to something like SecureId token one-time passwords? If you can have a different six digit number every sixty seconds for five years on one device, surely the same (now public domain) algorithms could be embedded in a credit card. The infrastructure for real-time verification is already in place. With one stroke, the whole CC# theft business could be out of business, and the first mover CC company on this would have a huge marketing advantage: "No one can ever steal your Visa number again".
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you had read the article, you would have noted this passage:
Whether the cash registers transmitted this sensitive data over wifi is less relevant. The problem would have been much less severe if connections to the central database had been over https or ssh.Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
This is because as a group, we are the LEAST professional of the professional vocations. With our paper MCSE's to our lack of communication skills, our refusal in some cases to "dress for success" and sometimes questionable bathing habits. Everybody who has worked in IT knows someone personally who fits this description.
You are correct, we do need organizations to screen our professionals as much as any other field. The 'soft' skills are just as important as technical prowess to be a true professional. It always helps when people assume that instead of spending all of your free time memorizing Battlestar Gallactica scripts, that you might actually have time for a girlfriend.
We did this to ourselves.
Many credit card companies now allow you to generate temporary card numbers with user-set caps on spending, on their websites.
Get off my launchpad!
It's a rather frightening notion that people think of WEP or WPA as their sole means of security. The underlying data were apparently unencrypted, which implies open protocols like telnet and http. WEP was intended to make wireless as "secure" as wired networking, which means not much. WEP shouldn't be used because it's completely compromised, but even WPA shouldn't be the sole level of security. WPA should be viewed as a means to thwart casual snooping of network traffic, but I'd still hope secure data layer protocols like ssh and https are being employed, not to mention encrypting data files that contain sensitive data.