Robert Siciliano, an ID-theft expert, discusses a reported MasterCard and Visa data breach where attackers may have compromised administrator accounts to steal Track 1 and Track 2 card data. He advises cardholders to monitor statements weekly and dispute any unauthorized charges immediately.
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In the meantime, ain't life a breach? More than 10 million MasterCard and Visa cards may have been compromised in what's already being called a massive security breach, and now word that the Secret Service is looking into all of this. ID theft expert Robert Siciliano says that cardholders have very good reason to be very, very worried right now. Robert, do we know what happened or what's alleged to have happened?
The, uh, buzz is that organized crime, uh, possibly of Latin American descent in New York were able to compromise an administrator's account, potentially using knowledge-based questions and answers to get— to bypass security.
So if you can get through to that, what do you get access to?
So once you're in, depending on what level that they entered through, they may have been able to actually put some type of a spyware, malware on the system. Or had full administrative control, uh, seeing what's, uh, passing through the servers and collecting that data. And over the course of a month, you know, depending on, uh, the size of the payment processor, they could potentially have garnered millions and millions, tens of millions of credit card numbers, Track 1 and Track 2 data.
Do we know if they've done any of that or, or, or been, you know, getting millions of dollars?
Well, initial reports are that, um, They're only showing numbers in the, in the hundreds, in the thousands, you know, 50, 60, 80,000. But they're saying, you know, little birdies are saying somewhere, somehow, that it could be tens of millions. That being said, the amount of fraud that has been perpetrated thus far in regards to this breach, that information is not yet disclosed.
All right, so for people who have Visa or MasterCard, that sort of thing, what do they do? What can they do?
So you have a credit card, I have a credit card, you know, you use it, waiter, waitress, gas station attendant, you hand it off to a cab driver and so on. Every time you give it out, it's at risk. Every time, even if you're sitting home doing nothing with it, it's at risk. So what I recommend that people do is plain and simple is pay close attention to your statements. I look at my statements at least weekly online, both at my bank and my credit card, making sure that all those charges were authorized by me. You have up to 60 days by federal law to refute unauthorized charges, so make sure that at least within each billing cycle you're looking at every single charge and making sure that you made that charge.
But what about this notion of follow— yeah, but following the card, I mean, if you're at a restaurant and the waiter takes your card, you're supposed to follow him to wherever he's going to process it, or—
No, you can't do that.
Right.
In the overseas, in Europe, they bring the the payment terminal to you, the POS, whereas in the US they disappear. And when they disappear, there's not much you can do about that. So you can't actually protect the card or protect the number, but you can pay attention to your statements and again refute those charges if they weren't made by you.
All right, Robert, good words. Thank you very, very much. Good seeing you. Robert Siciliano.
