Online Credit Card Scams Increased

It seems that retail customers will now be in for a harder ride in case of security isn’t tightened up at every step. The matter is that the recent research revealed increase of as much as 43% in retail-focused attacks within the last year.

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According to Dell, SecureWorks managed to prevent 91,500 online attacks per retail customer during 2011. Meanwhile, it was only 63,581 from the same time last year, and you can calculate the difference yourself. CTO Jon Ramsey claimed in his statement that the Internet has long ago become an ideal attack vector for both clients and servers. According to the same report, one of the largest threats remains the SQL injection. The researchers pointed out that it was no surprise SQL injection proves a popular way of hacking. Actually, for criminals, it is simply a no-brainer which works really great. The report mentions one Georgia hacker that recently confessed to pinching around 675,000 credit card details. The case in question proves again that exploit kits and Trojans are still very popular among scammers.

The report showed that there were several things that retailer CIOs are recommended to do in order to keep their customer information secure. First of all, they are advised to develop a centralized plan allowing them to keep patch management and security updated, on both the servers and the workstations. One more good idea for any retailer CIO is to consider the idea of an authenticated proxy server. This would allow the admin to figure out which users work on the infected computer or are visiting Internet pages containing malware.

Although the recommendations like these are a kind of element of the obvious, the security specialists still remind that employees should not download any executable files, particularly through peer-to-peer networks. Checking out warez or porn sites are not recommended as well.

By the way, the things went as far as the following: security outfit Imperva has recently stumbled on a forum where credit card details are sold for a pittance. The data includes numbers of the cards, coupled with full details, including name, full address, email, expiry date and date of birth, according to the advertisement post on the forum. Anyone is therefore able to buy UK MasterCard’s details for as little as $4, and US Visa card is sold for $2.

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