2008 Credit Card Data Breach Trends

Posted on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 by Bryan Johnson

I recently listened to a presentation by a security group that performs forensics work when a merchant experiences a credit card data breach. Here are the breach trends they've seen during 2008:

Methods of entry - largely unchanged

Insecure remote access software
SQL injection

Breaching credit card data - evolved strategies

Capturing credit card data in transit over the network between devices
Via program modification after a vulnerable application was breached
Via collection of Random Access Memory (RAM) contents

Techniques used - most apply to software POS

Key-logging
Network sniffers
Serial port sniffers

Case Study

In one case study they shared the criminal was able to penetrate the network via remote access software. They then installed a debugging tool to collect RAM contents and malware to parse track data. The malware then uploaded the data to a Russian website. The merchant was using a PABP POS that was not collecting prohibited cardholder data.

Add this post to other sites: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.