Criminal Web Sites Taken Down

[mosaix]

Criminal sites have been taken down after police on four continents co-operated in a two year operation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17851257

The BBC's Ben Ando said that, privately, officers admitted that it could be frustrating dealing with internet companies who were not used to being policed and were reluctant to agree to anything that they perceived to be an infringement of their freedoms.

[Bowler1]

Where do they get all these credit card details that this information can be sold at £2 a card, thats what I really want to know?

[Moonbat]

From what I read in 'Kingpin: The story of how one hacker took over the world' alot of this information is stolen from shops, where they have a till system that doesn't delete the information taken from cards straight away, the fraudsters can then collect hundreds of cards a day by havcking into the shops' system. It can happen when the shops update thier windows systems when holes are found and patches released. The patches are usually released when a security hole has been found (often by hackers working for the good guys) and if the hole isn't closed quickly enough someone writes some code to hack into machines that haven't closed it and steal the information.
I think Chip and Pin is a lot safer than the old cards, but I'm sure plenty of places still store all the information that they can take from a card that is used.

[Vertigo]

It's actually getting steadily harder and harder to do this as new regulations are brought in.

There is a new certification thing come in (in the UK at least) for companies taking credit cards. We had to do this for the first time last year, though our certification was not too onerous as we fell under the category of "No Electronic Storage, Processing, or Transmission of Cardholder Data." However even so we had to show, for example, that we had procedures in place (and followed) to ensure all credit card receipts (shop copy) are shredded along with any received through mail order. A bit of a pain but it does make sense.

[Bowler1]

At £2 a pop there has to be a big volume involved. There must still be big holes in the system for this to work. These holes don't have to be in the UK, does Europe use chip and pin, I have no idea? Very reassuring Vertigo, for the UK at least.

[Vertigo]

Yes most of Europe had chip and pin before us as I recall.

I think if you sell on the internet and the actual card details are taken on your own pages (as opposed to the payment gateway pages) then you have to pay to have a secruity firm to inspect all your systems to ensure they are sufficiently secure. This is one of the reasons that we move our customers over to the bank payment gateway pages for the actual card transaction. Safer for everybody that way I figure.