If you are interested in writing about large-scale data and credit card theft, you could look to the Target, Home Depot, and Ashley Madison data breaches for inspiration. Much of what we know about these breaches comes from reporter Brian Krebs. His blog is fascinating, and I recommend it very highly. This post will refer heavily to his reporting.
(This post will refer to Target the retailer and targets of crime. Mind the capitalization to tell the difference.)
The retailer Target was the victim of a large data breach during the 2013 holiday shopping season. Criminals stole credit card information of 40 million customers and personal information (names, email and mailing addresses, phone numbers) of 70 million customers. The numbers here are so large that the thieves had trouble selling all the stolen credit card numbers before banks were able to cancel the credit cards, and some banks had trouble re-issuing cards, because the people who turn plastic into credit cards had a huge backlog of orders. (Target recently agreed to a $39.4 million settlement with banks and credit unions as a result of this breach.)
The picture that Krebs’ reporting paints about the Target breach is that it involved an external HVAC company that worked for Target. Someone at the HVAC company fell for a phishing attack, which probably installed a keylogger or some other malware on that person’s (the HVAC company employee) PC, and this enabled the criminals to acquire login information to servers that Target’s vendors use to interact with Target (for work orders, billing, etc.). The criminals were able to use this access to install malware on the point-of-sale (POS) devices at target stores. (Yes, there are probably several steps missing there, which I don’t understand, either, but it’s not the point of this post.) The POS malware was able to upload credit card data to another compromised server on Target’s internal network, and then that internal server exfiltrated the stolen data (gigabytes of it) to external FTP servers all over the world. (See Krebs’ coverage of the Target data breach for more details.)
Much the same thing happened to Home Depot in 2014. Criminals installed malware on thousands of self-checkout lanes at nearly every Home Depot location. The criminals got away with 56 million credit card numbers and 53 million customer email addresses. As happened with Target, the Home Depot network was initially breached using login credentials stolen from a third-party vendor. (Again, Krebs has more details about the Home Depot data breach.)
Although it didn’t involve credit card theft, the Ashley Madison story is similar. Ashley Madison is a social networking site created with the specific intention of enabling elicit (e.g., extra-marital) affairs. Someone managed to download and publish the account information of many or all of the AM users. Little is publicly known about how that information was acquired, but the CEO of AM’s parent company implied that it was the work of a non-employee who had previously had access to the AM information resources.
The takeaway here is something that might be useful for writing any kind of story about corporate hacking and espionage. In all three of these examples, a confirmed or suspected method of infiltration involved a vendor hired by the target company. Even if the vendor isn’t complicit, the vendor may be a softer target with lower standards of security (or with more access than they really needed). Breaching the vendor may give the attacker a foothold into the larger target.
Carl Welch: Writing Tech 