We’ve been following the whole TJX saga for quite some time now since way back in September 2007 when the hack became public as the Largest Breach of Customer Data in U.S. History and in August 2008 when the TJX Credit Card Hackers Got Busted.

The legal system has ticked along and now they have to stand up for their charges, which are spiraling as more and more cases are linked to them.

Albert “Segvec” Gonzalez has been indicted by a federal grand jury in New Jersey — along with two unnamed Russian conspirators — on charges of hacking into Heartland Payment Systems, the New Jersey-based card processing company, as well as Hannaford Brothers, 7-Eleven and two unnamed national retailers, according to the indictment unsealed Monday. Gonzalez, a former Secret Service informant, is already awaiting trial over his involvement in the TJX hack.

According to the court document, the hackers allegedly stole more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers (.pdf) from Heartland and Hannaford combined. Prosecutors say they believe these breaches constitute the largest data-breach and identity-theft case ever prosecuted in the United States. They’re investigating other breaches and have not ruled out Gonzalez’s involvement in even more intrusions.

“We’re not seeing a huge array of hackers capable of doing this, but rather a more select group, [and that] demonstrates that there is a level of sophistication involved in these hacks,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Erez Liebermann of the Justice Department’s New Jersey district office.

As with most things, 80% of the damage is done by 20% of the people. I’d say in this case it’s more like 98% of the damage is done by 2% of the hackers only a few of which ever get caught.

I think these guys just got too greedy and went after too many targets, but then their credit card theft ring is called “Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin”. They aren’t likely to die, but they are likely to go down for a long time.

But these are just the latest in a string of high-profile breaches that have been connected to Gonzalez. He and 10 others were charged in May and August 2008 with network intrusions into TJX, OfficeMax, Dave & Busters restaurant chain and other companies. Jury selection is slated to begin Sept. 14 in one of those cases. With regard to the Heartland-Hannaford cases, Gonzalez and the two unnamed Russian hackers have been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

They each face a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a possible maximum fine of $250,000 on the computer-fraud count and an additional 30 years and $1 million fine on the wire-fraud count, or twice the amount they gained from the offense, whichever is greater.

Attorneys for Gonzalez were not available for comment.

According to the New Jersey indictment, Gonzalez, 28, and an uncharged conspirator identified only as “P.T.,” allegedly found their targets on a list of Fortune 500 companies and then did reconnaissance to determine the payment-processing systems they used and uncover vulnerabilities. The hackers used computers they leased or controlled in California, Illinois and New Jersey as well as in Latvia, Ukraine and the Netherlands to store malware, launch their attacks against the networks, and receive the stolen numbers.

If you tally up all the counts that could be one hell of a sentence, especially with the 30 years for the wire-fraud tacked on. I guess if they ever manage to get out of prison, they might get to enjoy the millions they have stolen.

That is assuming they’ve laundered it and stashed it safely somewhere outside the jurisdiction of a US federal investigation.

Either way it’s an interesting case and I’m sure there will be more news about it.

Source: Wired (Thanks Navin)

I find it a little surprising in this day and age that such a low percentage of IT managers believe data loss is a low impact issue.

Don’t they read the news? Don’t they understand how losing customer trust can really effect your bottom-line?

I would have thought 30% of respondents thinking data loss was high impact as a low figure, but 7%? That’s just insane.

A mere seven per cent of respondents to a survey on data management believed data loss has a “high” impact on a business.

This is one of the key findings of a survey launched in Hong Kong yesterday by Kroll Ontrack, a US-based provider of data recovery solutions. The survey was conducted earlier this year by StollzNow Research. It asked IT managers from 945 small, medium and large companies in Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia about their views and experiences related to data management.

The survey found that just less than half (49 per cent) of all IT managers have reported a data loss situation in the last two years.

Even more shocking is that half of the small business surveyed don’t even run back-ups! It’s so cheap and simple now with mass storage devices available off the shelf with Terabytes of storage.

There’s really no excuse for not backing up any more, I even had a 2TB RAID mirrored storage unit at home to back up my personal stuff. All my websites are backed up nightly and the backups sent to multiple physical servers and DB backups sent via e-mail.

While larger companies may not fully appreciate the risks they face with data loss, it is the small business sector that appears to be most at risk. An alarming 49 per cent of small companies stated that they fail to back up their data on a daily basis.

This is despite the fact that nearly half of all participants had experienced data loss in their workplace in the past two years, and 36 per cent felt that data loss could have a significant impact on their business.

Small businesses were also less likely to test their backup systems on a regular basis, or to have implemented a policy for the preservation of data. While 61 per cent of overall respondents reported that their company had a formalised data retention policy, this figure fell to just 45 per cent for companies with 50 or fewer employees.

I’d be interested to see a similar survey for the US and Europe to see if the figures are in the same kind of range.

It’s very common though for policies and backups to be implemented and never updated or tested. So when a failure actually occurs the company finds out their system isn’t even working.

Computers and backup systems don’t just keep magically working, especially when you’re changing configurations, server setups and software all the time.

Source: Network World

We did mention Torpig in passing back in January 2008 when talking about the Mebroot rootkit which digs down deep into the Master Boot Record.

It seems like Torpig has been pretty active since then and the latest break is that some security researchers have managed to infiltrate the botnet and collect some data on what it’s doing.

I always enjoy reading about these ‘insider’ stories though as it’s hard to know unless someone gets access what these botnet fellas are really achieving.

Security researchers have managed to infiltrate the Torpig botnet, a feat that allowed them to gain important new insights into one of the world’s most notorious zombie networks by collecting an astounding 70 GB worth of data stolen in just 10 days.

During that time, Torpig bots stole more than 8,300 credentials used to login to 410 different financial institutions, according to the research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara. More than 21 percent of the accounts belonged to PayPal users. Overall, a total of almost 298,000 unique credentials were intercepted from more than 52,000 infected machines.

One of the secrets behind the unusually large haul is Torpig’s ability to siphon credentials from a large number of computer programs. After wrapping its tentacles around Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, Skype, ICQ, and 26 other applications, Torpig constantly monitors every keystroke entered into them. Every 20 minutes, the malware automatically uploads new data to servers controlled by the authors.

It seems like once Torpig is dug into the machine it can get hold of everything, being based on a low level rootkit it can intercept anything including important credentials from financial institutions and money services like Paypal.

The numbers are quite huge with the malware having the ability to steal all kinds of accounts and access details from both software and web based applications.

In all, the researchers counted more than 180,000 infected PCs that connected from 1.2 million IP addresses. The data underscores the importance of choosing the right methodology for determining the actual size of a botnet and, specifically, not equating the number of unique IP addresses with the number of zombies. “Taking this value as the botnet size would overestimate the actual size by an order of magnitude,” they caution.

Torpig, which also goes by the names Sinowal and Anserin, is distributed through Mebroot, a rootkit that takes hold of a computer by rewriting the hard drive’s master boot record. As a result, Mebroot is executed during the early stages of a PC’s boot process, allowing it to bypass anti-virus and other security software.
By infiltrating Torpig, the researchers were able to become flies on the wall that could watch infected users as they unwittingly handed over sensitive login credentials. One victim, an agent for an at-home, distributed call center, transmitted no fewer than 30 credit card numbers, presumably belonging to customers, the researchers guessed.

The number of unique IP addresses per infection is quite interesting too and it shows if you estimate the size of a botnet by unique IP addresses you could easily be out by a factor of 5.

And wow, infecting a call center PC dealing with credit cards? That must be a botnet masters wet-dream – that really is a gold mine.

Imagine if they could spread the infection through the whole call-center, they would be rolling in credit card details.

Source: The Register

UK Police have uncovered a fairly massive data theft operation with a total close to 8,500 victims.

It’s quite worrying when things like this are uncovered as if 1 is uncovered or discovered…imagine how many aren’t found out about, just like exploits.

British electronic-crime detectives are investigating a massive data theft operation that stole sensitive information from 8,500 people in the U.K. and others in some 60 countries, officials said Tuesday.

In total, cybercriminals targeted 600 financial companies and banks, according to U.K. authorities, who have worked over the past week to identify and notify victims.

Through intelligence sources, U.K. police were given several gigabytes of data — around 130,00 files — that came from a server in the U.S., said Charlie McMurdie, detective chief inspector for the Specialist Crime Directorate e-Crime Unit of the London Metropolitan Police. Most of the data related to financial information, she said.

Several GIG of data, that’s a hell of a lot of text.

They were using a pretty basic program though, haxdoor.

The data was collected by a malicious software program nicknamed Haxdoor that infected victims’ computers. Some 2,300 machines were located in the U.K. McMurdie said.

Haxdoor is a powerful program that can collect passwords and send them to another e-mail address plus disable a computer’s firewall, among other functions, according to a description posted on security vendor F-Secure Corp.’s Web site. Symantec Corp., another security company, wrote it first detected Haxdoor in November 2003.

Computers can get infected with Haxdoor if they don’t have security patches or up-to-date antivirus software. London police said it’s believed many victims were infected through instant message programs.

Nice to see the good guys also using technology to parse the data and locate victims.

Metropolitan police experts built a special program to search through the data and identify victims, she said. The data contained information such as logins and passwords for major Web sites such as eBay Inc., Amazon.com, BT Group PLC and Pipex Internet Ltd., a U.K. Internet service provider.

In some instances, Haxdoor employed a screen-capture function to obtain information, McMurdie said.

Source: Infoworld