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."

Comments

Good Journalsim, Good Article

[retroworks]

Took about 5 minutes to read it. Didn't see any "first posts!" in the interim. Either others find it as fascinating, or I lack a life reading /. at midnight on Christmas eve.

Re:Good Journalsim, Good Article

[berberine]

rare is the teenager who knows not to brag...

Not quite on the same level, but my local paper recently ran a story of a convenience store robbery. The person who did it stole a lot of junk food and close to $1000. The police admitted they had no leads and were clueless about who did it. They were basically saying that the perpetrator was going to get away with it. Two days later, they arrest a 16-year old male because he was bragging to his classmates at school about how dumb everyone was and how smart he was because no one knew it was him.

Re:Good Journalsim, Good Article

[Anonymous Coward]

-Dig through various forum/social network archives to see if any matched the owner of the underground site (from step #1)

That probably was the more difficult step. Most of these chats had been deleted or archived. And most of it was in Russian. He probaby was on these sites for a while, also note that a lot of these chats are private chats between 3rd parties, so getting ahold of this was probably some work.

Interesting, but I heard another tale

[Nyder]

I game with someone who works in a high position at one of the top finical firm. And when stuff like this happens, they hear about it and discuss it, since it affects them.

I can not back this up, this is what is I was told:

The credit card fraud was because some of the CC scanners have an extra chip in them, put in at a factory, that allows backdoor access to those machines. Not all the CC scanners have this, only some.

And of course, the extra chip isn't spec.

The person who told me is out of town till the end of week, so I can't hear any more updates till probably next week on it.

 

Re:Purview of NSA?

[TechyImmigrant]

My understand is not that they like card fraud, but they do *really really* like the current situation regarding liability. I.E. The banks carry none of the liability. If they are provisioning strong crypto and credentials to ensure secure transactions, the liability landscape changes in way that are bound to be worse than the current optimal (as far as the bank is concerned) situation.