Have You Checked Your Balance Lately?
WHAT’S the latest craze that’ll have the rogues and ruffians buzzing all season?
Grabbing your credit/debit card information “in transit.”
They just snatch that shit during the card verification process while you’re making a purchase at the grocery store:
Hannaford said 4.2 million debit- and credit-card numbers were exposed between Dec. 7 and March 10. There was a report of fraudulent activity on 1,800 unique cards as of Monday, but a running tally of all fraud associated with the case is not being kept…
[Portland Press Herald: Data stolen from Hannaford during transit]
Apparently it was a real “no one could have anticipated the breaching of the levees” moment:
In [a grocery store point-of-service] transaction … the card information does not have to be encrypted because it is in a private network. But it is supposed to be transmitted over an encrypted line.
If I read that right, the information was compromised after the swiping of a card but before transmission. OMG! THE HACKING IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE STORE.
Your Montag is no security expert, but it seems to me that an organization that gives prospective employees a personality test to determine what they would do if a friend or co-worker stole ten dollars from the till, might have had stricter safeguards in place for credit card data.
Stump Lane 