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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.
TJX - commonly known to American consumers as TJ Max and Marshalls retail stores. If you made purchases at these stores, you could be affected.
At this point in time, WEP is more like the lock on your bathroom door. Fine to let people know that you don't want visitors, but not really designed to keep anyone out who wants to get in.
WPA is more like a front-door with a keylock and a deadbolt. Someone could break in, but they'd have to at least take a little more trouble than pulling a coin out of their pocket like you can do with "interior" locks.
If it's something you need to be secure, then yeah, you should be running encrypted traffic over a physically secure wired connection, not broadcasting everything to the neighborhood.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
There's plenty of older hardware that doesn't have the processing power to do WPA, and has to rely on WEP. This is especially true for embedded devices (like print servers and bar code scanners) and PDAs. And for larger companies, replacing every single access point AND WiFi-device isn't a small thing.
Could you imagine being the IT manager who has to tell upper management that the big expense you added to the budget two years ago, which was supposed to last five years before being incrementally replaced, now has to be completely trashed and replaced in one go because the encryption turned out to not be safe?
The best thing many companies can do short term is to limit the damage, by restricting the use of WEP to data that they can afford losing. But even that requires admitting flaws, and is likely to get your head chopped off for bringing the bad news.
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!
If there are older devices that only support WEP, those can be moved to a separate router and firewalled/VLAN/etc.
I wonder how much money the 'Credit Monitoring' services make out with all these breeches?
It seems to me the only solution to this is to pass strong data ownership protections for consumers. Right now, the companies place very little value on the data (except for marketing/advertising purposes), but this needs to change somehow.
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.
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.
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.