Posts tagged Credit
Saudi Hacker Threatens to Release 1 Million Israeli Credit Card Numbers
Jan 6th
After releasing 15,000 credit card numbers hacked from an Israeli website on Tuesday, the Saudi hacker known as 0xOmar has released 11,000 more today. He has threatened to release a further one million.
The hacker broke into a popular Israeli sports site, making off with hundreds of thousands of accounts’ worth of personal information, including some credit card numbers.
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Of the numbers released, credit companies claim only a few hundred dollars was illegally spent before the cards were closed down, according to the Washington Post.
group-xp
On Tuesday, in a statement on the sports site, the hacker claimed to have stolen 400,000 identities. The message left on the sport site, according to CNN, included an introduction.
“Hi, it’s 0xOmarfrom group-xp, largest Wahhabi hacker group of Saudi Arabia. We are anonymous Saudi Arabian hackers. We decided to release first part of our data about Israel.”
Hacker News reported that his group claimed to be a part of the Anonymous hacking collective.
Yoram Hacohen, who heads up the Law, Information and Technology Authority at the Israeli Ministry of Justice, told CNN that “Israeli authorities have begun a criminal investigation, including a computer forensic probe to search for electronic evidence to try to locate the group.” He is more worried about identity theft than credit card fraud.
This week, Israeli security companies have taken this opportunity to speak to computer security overall in the country. According to Oren Levy, CEO of ZooZ:
“The core of the problem lies in the fact that payment information, such as credit cards, ID and phone numbers, and other information, is being processed and stored by tens of thousands of different merchants who aren’t equipped to handle the information. There is a real need to separate merchants from this critical private data.”
Is he or isn’t he?
Haaretz reported that a blogger named Amir Fedida claimed to have unmasked the blogger as Omar Habib, a student from the United Arab Emirates “works in a café, and studies computer science in at the ‘Hidalguense Cenhies’ in Mexico.”
In another report from the Jerusalem Post, the hacker denies he is anything other than what he claims, and says he’s too well hidden to be unmasked.
Cyber-attacks, both by governmental, and amateur, hacking teams, have become more and more part of the landscape of international relations in the last few years.
Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of cyber-attacks.
Shekel photo by Michael Plump, Dome of the Rock photo by Allistair | additional information from Jonah Balfour
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Phishing Attack Aimed to Obtain Apple Users Credit Card Information
Jan 2nd
A phishing attack aimed at new Mac users was launched the week after Christmas looking to obtain the credit card information of people signing up for a new Apple ID. The well-timed attack tries to redirect users signing up for an Apple ID to a phishing site designed to look like the Apple sign-in page asking users to update their account information.
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Security firm Intego found the attack and posted the information on its company blog. The phishing email comes from applied@id.apple.com. This should give users their first pause as all Apple emails come from the @apple.com domain. The next red flag is that the URL that users are getting redirected to is not an apple.com email address but rather goes to a numbered IP address.
Source: Intego
The sign-in page asks for users profile information, including the credit card information that is tied to an Apple ID account.
One of the first rules users should be aware of when checking for malware and spam in email is to hover over a suspicious URL with to see the location of the URL they are about to click. Tell tale signs of phishing, malware and malicious sites are when the URL does not appear to be headed to an official page from the company in question.
The phishers behind this attack have likely been sitting on it a while, waiting for when users received new Apple products during the holiday season. Malware makers are very sensitive when it comes to the timing of attacks. Zero day hacks are often stockpiled and unleashed when the impact of them will be optimal. Other malware and spam attacks are saved up for big news stories, such as what was seen during the Japan earthquake in 2011 or the death of Osama bin Laden. Spammers will then hit search engines with poisoned results and attempt to fill email inboxes with links to malicious sites. While the phishing attack aimed at Apple users was not a zero day attack, it is an example of phishers knowing when the best times are to launch an offensive.
Did you encounter an email similar to this last week? What other phishing attempts have been made against your inbox recently? Let us know in the comments.
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New Requirement Changes For Bad Credit Personal Loans, Announced … – PR Web (press release)
Dec 25th
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New Requirement Changes For Bad Credit Personal Loans, Announced …
PR Web (press release) Also, they are still in a collaboration with ArticleSearchEngineMarketing.com for their SEO services. About USAPaydayForever.com – USAPaydayForever.com is an online company that helps consumers to find and obtain payday personal loans. … SEO Marketer For Credit Personal Loans Services Given Christmas Present By … |
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SEO Marketer For Credit Personal Loans Services Given Christmas Present By … – DigitalJournal.com (press release)
Dec 25th
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SEO Marketer For Credit Personal Loans Services Given Christmas Present By …
DigitalJournal.com (press release) As a part of their announcement, they wanted to let their SEO Marketer, for their credit personal loans services, to know they are sending a gift to his family for their Christmas celebration. USAPaydayForever.com felt as if this particular employee … |
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Survey: 80% of Consumers Want Alternative Payment Methods to Credit Cards Online
Dec 13th
When it comes to mobile payments, how much do you really trust your credit card being attached to your smartphone? Is it secure? Are merchants going to sell your personal information or start sending you piles of junk mail? These are some of the concerns that a new report from Javelin Strategy and Research surfaced this fall during a survey of consumers’ fears of mobile payments and online transactions.
The survey concludes that four out of five consumers would spend more money online if they considered credit cards safer and had payment alternatives. Javelin predicts that an additional $109.8 billion would be spent by offering a “no credit card required” way to pay online and at merchants.
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It is important to note that Javelin’s survey was commissioned by PaymentOne, a direct-to-carrier payments company. PaymentOne has a direct benefit in trying to get consumers’ off credit cards and start paying through their cellphone or cable bills. The survey was conducted in the fall of 2011 and polled more than 2,000 U.S. adults concerning payments preferences.
95% of respondents had mobile phones while only 36% had used that phone to pay for an item, be it an app, game, music or media streaming such as Netflix or Spotify. The top concerns around using credit cards online were privacy related concerning personal data falling into the hands of advertisers, marketers or malicious hackers.
There is a tenant in the payments industry that the more clicks that a user has to make, the less likely they are to make a purchase. These are often referred to as “pain point” or “friction.” Think about why Apple or Amazon do so well. Consumers enter their credit card numbers once and after that it is one-click processing with a password. Both companies have done masterful jobs of taking the friction out of payments.
On the other hand, the results of this survey should definitely be viewed through the lenses of a direct-to-carrier billing company trying to drum up support for its business model and get more online and offline merchants to use carrier billing, especially for smaller purchases. “No one is going to buy a fridge through carrier billing,” a PaymentOne executive said at CTIA in San Diego in October.
Users should think long and hard about storing credit card information on their smart devices. A report surfaced this morning that the Google Wallet leaves some information unencrypted if the device it is on is rooted. In the Android ecosystem there are also security concerns with malware-ridden apps that can theoretically gain root access and steal all information on a device. The Google Wallet sandboxes a lot of that data but as the Javelin survey points out, consumers have their fears regardless of the truth behind the technology.
What are your concerns with mobile payments? Is there a reason to fear using your credit card online or is the survey slanting its findings towards the benefit of its client? Let us know in the comments.
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USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal … – PR Web (press release)
Nov 22nd
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USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal …
PR Web (press release) USAPaydayForever.com Sees This And Hires A New SEO Marketer To Help Their Promote Bad Credit Personal Loans To Aid Those Who Will Be Affected By The Super Committee Failure A recent Yahoo news article stated that the congress super committee has failed … USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal … |
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USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal … – DigitalJournal.com (press release)
Nov 21st
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USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal …
DigitalJournal.com (press release) A statement was issued by USAPaydayForever.com about their new SEO marketing professional, their role with the bad credit persona loans promotion campaign, and the economy in general. In this statement, USAPaydayForever.com said, “There is some unease … |
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New Visa Credit Card Comes With Its Own LCD
Nov 2nd
Earlier this fall Visa announced a new credit card in Europe that comes with its 48×8 pixel LCD panel on the back, just above where your signature would normally go. Called the CodeSure Matrix Display Card, the idea is to have a more secure credit card, that can be used for online shopping where you have to use your card without swiping it at a retail payment terminal. This is what the credit industry calls “card not present” and they charge higher per-transaction fees to the merchants because of the fraud potentials seen.
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The CodeSure card can be used as a regular Visa debit, credit or pre-payment card. In addition to the display, it comes with a numeric keypad and a battery that is supposed to last up to three years. After testing over the past year, the card is now commercially available in Europe.
Visa says that the card “can also be used for services like eBanking, telephone banking, transactions signing and access to third party services.” It can offer messages in non-Roman alphabets too, should that be an issue. Similar to an encrypted key fob, it provides a one-time PIN number that is used during the transaction to verify the owner’s identity. This is done via the numeric keypad. Issuing banks can use this card to verify that they are indeed talking to their customers and not someone who has stolen their card.
Two vendors have helped bring this card to market: NagraID Security’s display technology was combined with Emue Technologies, who handled the authentication piece.
The small display on the card reminds me of one of my first portable computers, the classic Radio Shack model 100. It had a 40×7 character display and built-in text editing and communications software, along with a blazingly fast 300 bps modem, all in a package about the size of several iPads stacked on top of each other. Now of course, this had a full QWERTY keypad, but it seems we have come a long way since this trusty old beast.
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What Will Wal-Mart Do With Square Mobile Credit Card Readers?
Oct 24th
Mobile credit card transaction platform Square is coming to the nation’s largest retailer. Square has struck a deal with Wal-Mart that will bring the dongle into retail stores across the country. The move is huge for Square but seems antithetical to its core business model, which is to bring mobile credit card readers to the masses.
Bloomberg Business Week first reported the story. Outside of saying that Square will now be located in 9,000 retail stores nationwide, Bloomberg does not say exactly what the use case inside of Wal-Mart stores will be. There are a variety of possibilities.
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Mobile Checkout
Ever been in an Apple store and made a purchase directly with the sales rep that you were working with, as opposed to going to pay at a register? Imagine that in the middle of a Wal-Mart store. Say you are shopping for clothes, or shoes or … Wal-Mart sells everything. You just want to make a quick purchase and head out of the store. In theory, Wal-Mart could arm all of the floor representatives with Square dongles and have customers in and out. It may even help alleviate long lines at the checkout.
It is also imaginable that Wal-Mart could set up in-store payment kiosks away from the registers with the Square Register. It could just be a little booth in every department of a Wal-Mart that would be designed to handle payments for a couple of items.
It would be doubtful that Wal-Mart would go to 100% Square, especially at its existing register system. One would think that it would be cost prohibitive to rip out its entire point-of-sale system and replace it with iPads and Square Registers.
Square Card Case Deal?
One of the biggest benefits for Square could be to get Wal-Mart to leverage its existing Card Case program that allows for simple payments and transaction information between the customer, the retailer and the payments platform. The Square Card Case was unveiled in May and initially only rolled out to five cities and 50 retail partners.
Square posits the Card Case as an Amazon-style “one-click buying” method, except in the real-world as opposed to digital payments. Users that download the app can set up a “card” from a retailer and see what is happening with the retailer, from new deals to changes in the menu. Wal-Mart could institute the Card Case in a variety of ways, from the national level for what is happening with all Wal-Mart retail stores, to dedicating local managers to updating the card case for each individual store.
The best use case for Square has always been the notion of bringing credit card readers to small and medium business. We often think farmers markets or taxis when we think of Square’s growth potential. Square’s COO Keith Rabois said in the Bloomberg article that will continue to be the case. In terms of that goal, the Wal-Mart adoption may have the affect of a giant marketing campaign. The greatest benefit to Square from Wal-Mart may not be actual transaction revenue, but helping to speed up the awareness and adoption of the platform.
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