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Target Hackers Have More Data Than They Can Sell
itwbennett writes "The hackers who stole millions of credit card numbers from Target customers are probably 'laying low knowing that everyone is looking for them,' says Alex Holden, who runs cybercrime consultancy Hold Security. But it's also likely that they can't sell them: 'You can imagine that having a lot of stolen credit cards will not net the hackers, say $35 per card for all 40 million,' said Holden. 'Even if the hackers are willing to sell cards for $1 a card, no one will buy the stolen goods in these amounts.'"
You can always reduce things. They can sell a smaller subsets.
next to everybody's card has been stolen, is it time for everybody to get a new card? It'll make the stolen database worthless, as well as all other databases of stolen credit cards...
My bank (Chase) has sent out new cards to anyone that had a transaction at Target during the time period they indicated of the breach, and many other banks/financial institutions have done likewise. The value of the purloined data is heading towards nil quickly.
And now you understand the dilemma of De Beers and OPEC, which have more diamonds and oil than they know what to do with and trickle them to the market to keep the price up.
Security through Ubiquity!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The data was stolen by the company that prints the replacement cards.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's 110 million. Yes about 1/3 of the U.S. population has used a credit card at Target. I pray they don't hit Wal Mart.
Actually, the merchant eats it - at least that's been my experience as a merchant. The ingestion process is called a chargeback. It's one reason why credit card issuers are so glad to make refunds to consumers. Merchants live in fear of chargebacks because not only do they lose the revenue, they also have to pay a penalty.
As a merchant, you quickly figure out that it's best to accommodate any request for a refund, even if you think you're being treated unfairly. For example, I recently had a customer in another country who asked me to pay his local taxes on the sale I had just made to him. So I gave him a refund for the amount of the tax. Easy decision.
(I shouldn't be telling you folks this, it's supposed to be a dirty little secret. Don't tell anybody else.)
Somehow, as a favor to someone, I ended up managing the operations of a service based company for a short period of time. We would have customers that constantly were saying: "Do you know who I am?" Usually the past, past, past president of some condo association. Or customers who thought we'd starve without their business and make all kinds of unreasonable demands that would result in a loss to us. We'd let that happen maybe two or three times and when it became apparent that the customer's behavior was chronic I would simply tell them that our goal was to satisfy our customers in every way and obviously we were unable to meet their needs. We valued their satisfaction and felt they would be better served by another company. I'd then suggest a competitor for them to call. The reactions were priceless! They couldn't believe they were being "fired". It helped us two ways. First, it freed up our resources to service the customers who appreciated being treated fairly (and we really were service oriented, money back guarantee on everything.) Second, by the time our competitor figured out what kind of customer they just took on they had suffered the loss.
This was a service industry where there was more work to do than we had people to do it so there really was no loss to us in culling the bad ones. Offtopic I know but maybe someone will benefit from our experience.