India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

A group of hackers from Eastern Europe has racked up 25 million dollars in fraudulent transactions after stealing half a million Australian credit cards, the federal police has revealed. Australian Federal Police has not provided the details of the investigation as it is ongoing, but confirmed they were working with law enforcement bodies in other countries to tackle the organized hacking ring. “The Australian Federal Police can confirm it is currently investigating a series of merchants whose individual computer systems have been compromised,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted a spokeswoman, as saying. “The compromise is believed to have involved approximately 500,000 credit cards and resulted in more than $25 million in fraudulent transactions,” she added. “This investigation demonstrates the importance of the AFP's close working relationship with its international law enforcement counterparts, private industry and the financial sector to combat this crime type and bring those responsible to justice,” the spokeswoman added. ?According to consultant Marc Bown at IT security firm Trustwave, a company that investigates data breaches on behalf of banks, said that hackers break into badly secured e-commerce websites via security holes in out-of-date shopping cart software, and into POS computers with weak passwords like ‘password1’ via remote desktop software used for technical support, the report added. According to the report, Bown said that often the breached stores were in rural and remote regions and had less than 50 employees. “[Hackers are] not going to spend twice as long trying to compromise a supermarket chain when they can go and compromise 50 fish and chip shops that have much weaker levels of security and which will ultimately give them the same end goal,” Bown added. “It’s going to cost them a lot less to go after the weaker targets than to spend all of their effort going after a single high-security target,” the report quoted Bown, as saying.

Hackers rack up $25 mln in fraud transactions after stealing Oz credit card info