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Who's Selling Credit Cards From Target?
An anonymous reader writes "Brian Krebs has done some detective work to determine who is behind the recent Target credit card hack. Krebs sifted through posts from a series of shady forums, some dating back to 2008, to determine the likely real-life identity of one fraudster. He even turns down a $10,000 bribe offer to keep the information under wraps."
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10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes it was very good, Krebs writes well and he seems to know his stuff.
That being said, was it really that easy? His steps to finding the perpetrator was:
-Scan underground sites that sell stolen credit cards
-Do a small buy to get a sample
-Found cards that matched the ones stolen from Target
-Dig through various forum/social network archives to see if any matched the owner of the underground site (from step #1)
-Contact the perp to see if he makes any incriminating statements (which he did by offering $10k bribe)
The perp may be an uber elite hacker, but he's very noob when it comes to hiding his tracks.
If the NSA/FBI/CIA/... was really interested in doing some good with all of the data mining they could solve or at least contribute to resolving cases like this. Prevention would even be better.
Krebs does know his stuff & much like J Edgar Hoover, he's been in the business accumulating files on all the underground criminal sites for years. It is this database of info & intimate knowledge of how it all fits together that allows him to dig up the info that budding criminals left online in forums where they let their hair down (assuming that the others were all thieves with honour) and then tie it together with public records. Even "elite hackers" (assuming that the lowlife Krebs exposed really is one) were young once & rare is the teenager who knows not to brag...
Go Brian, you inspire us all...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
seeing as how the chipped cards cost 5 times as much, I think we can consider this discussion closed :-D you know, the mantra of Wall Street is "screw the future, what are you doing for us this quarter?"
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?