End of October, a wave of credit card fraud caught people’s attention, with BECU acknowledging some 100 cases reported by its Capitol Hill customers. A month later, the U.S. Secret Service is saying that over 1,000 credit and debit card accounts may have been breached by a foreign hacker. Reports Bank Info Security:
The scheme appears to involve the sale or distribution of the stolen account information to numerous individuals across the country, as well as in foreign countries. Those individuals then used the information to make purchases against the consumer accounts.
Capitol Hill Seattle (CHS) reported on the story from the ground up, discovering that the Broadway Grill restaurant was the victim of a hack of its software, and then the hacker was able to “leapfrog from the restaurant’s access to a critical server in the transaction process where account information was available.”
“He was able to access numbers off the server going back prior to October,” Secret Service Agent Bob Kierstead told CHS, gaining access to accounts of people who had never eaten at Broadway Grill. At that time, fraud reports had totaled about 400.
Unfortunately, this international game of whack-a-hacker is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Tom Wills, a fraud analyst with Javelin Strategy & Research, told Bank Info Security that “the only effective way to secure the payments chain will come from the development of global standards for end-to-end encryption and security,” but that “isn’t anywhere on the horizon.”
