Hannaford cc data thieves planted malware on 300 servers
Other retailers may be vulnerable
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The data breach at Hannaford, the US grocery chain, which enabled the theft of info on more than 4.2 million credit card accounts was caused by a sophisticated piece of malware that attackers installed in all the company's retail outlets.
Installed on more than 300 servers in at least six states, the malware was able to intercept credit card data while customers paid for purchases using plastic and transmit the information overseas, The Boston Globe reports. The rogue software was installed on servers in close to 300 different locations, though the company isn't saying how it got there.
The malware lifted "track 2" data stored on the magnetic strip of customers' cards as customers used them at point-of-sale machines. The data includes the card number and expiration date, but not the customer's name. The malware stored records of the purchases in batches and periodically transmitted them to an unidentified offshore internet service provider, according to the company.
Security experts have been eager to figure out how thieves siphoned the data out of Hannaford Brothers Cos. network because the company is believed to have been following payment card industry (PCI) rules. If the east coast chain's systems were vulnerable, plenty of other retailers may be open to the same attack, the experts have warned. By contrast, TJX Cos, which in 2006 was robbed of credit data belonging to more than 100 million of its customers, flouted several important restrictions.
The US Secret Service is investigating the theft. ®
COMMENTS
No way were they compliant!
Two of the core sections (1.3.5 and 1.3.7) of PCI clearly state that there must be outbound filters and policies in firewalls to prevent this sort of data leakage. There is ABSOLUTELY no way that they were compliant at the time of the attack if these sorts of batch files could be transmitted to an arbitrary location outside of the company.
@ PCI and the Judgement of Solomon
I'm not so sure about PCI being updated every 1.34 seconds....
But the problem with compliance with PCI (which I quite like - its a very pragmatic Standard) or any other Standard is that you can only safely say that you're compliant at the date of last audit.There's no guarantee that you're compliant 24 hrs later.....
Standards compliance tends to make people complacent, I think..
Anyway, all credit to Hannafords for actually achieving the degree of compliance that they did. Unfortunately the indications are that they subsequently took their eyes off the ball called 'Vulnerability Management'....
@herman
> To the AC who soldered USB plugs and sockets together: It would have been better and easier to disable USB mass storage in the OS.
And, gosh, nobody would ever have been able nefariously to change it back again!
(I really hope you don't work in any job that requires logical thought...!)
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