Kmart apologizes to customers after month-long security breach Discount store Kmart admitted some customers’ payment cards have likely been “compromised” as it became the latest mega retailer to fall victim to cyber-crims. The parent of the chain, Sears Holding Corp, said the IT team discovered late Thursday that its payment systems had been breached, and further investigations indicate …
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WTF???????
Are you having me on?
Why on earth would the likes of GCHQ/NSA etc inform companies that their IT Systems Security is crap.
The more holes in them there are, the more data on the rest of us they can slurp free of charge and warrantless.
If they told a company that (for example) port 56789 in their firewall was open and would give admin access to the system containing all the names, addresses and credit histories of their customers, the spooks would have to admit that they had hacked the system themselves and be open to a whole lot of bad publicity, questions in the house and even the odd lawsuit or dozen. Put yourself in their shoes. Would you openly admit to these weaknesses?
There is more chance of a dog walking on Mars in the next five years than there is of the like of the NSA/GCHQ admitting that the sun rises in the east that there is of them owning yo all sorts of nefarious data slurping hacks.
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Well they would be basically protecting their respective economies.
Will you maybe just LOOK at the curves of national debt, money printed and "jobs created" outside of taxpayer-funded sectors?
Nobody in charge gives a flying FUCK about "protecting their respective economies".
Public choice theory: The people in charge are not there to help you. They are there so that they can enlarge their mansion. And probably for the lulz.
Use cash. Period.this is going to get worse, how many smaller chain stores have been infected but havent clue? All that is being offered is a years worth of free credit reports. I don't know about you, but when someone steals your identity, makes payments with your money, fucks with your credit, its not as simple as " oh, you were hacked or part of a scam? No problem, all is back to normal." No, its a hell of an uphill battle to clear your name, cost quite a bit of money and time to clean up someone else's mess, kinda like teenagers having a massive house party in your house while your out for the night. Its on you.
With Xmas around the corner, the thrives are just waiting.,.
I use a credit card for pretty much everything, cash occasionally, and the debit card not at all. To mitigate, check the transactions on the primary (high activity) credit card every few days, and reconcile the statements regularly and promptly. A number of years ago I questioned a charge and found it was for a purchase I made that had been transcribed wrong and credited to the wrong merchant several hundred miles distant. A couple of years before that (mid 1990s, I think) I contested an actual false charge; the bank investigated that and removed it after about a month and a half. Every two or three years an issuer cancels a card and sends a replacement, probably due to a breach somewhere. I suspect I am not all that far from the norm, and expect to continue this pattern at least until the last bank issues me a chip and PIN card and the law is changed to transfer fraud responsibility from the bank to me. Meanwhile, I am happy to accept free monitoring, courtesy of those companies that, whether or not from their negligence or mismanagement, lose some card info.
Really? Will any company escape unscathed? The US companies seem to be falling like domino's. Even minor players. I think a better method for financial transactions is on the horizon. Can it arrive in time to save millions or billions is costs?
Nah, just wishful thinking. Something horrendous will happen, the company will be absolved of all blame, and the customers will be out the cash, or foot the bill, surely not the banks...
“I sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our members and customers.”
... although he refused to speculate on whether the breach was the result of further cost cutting measures that saw the outsourcing of the company's entire IT security operation to a couple of "quite clever" college students on a part time work experience program.
Ah, but there in the warm promise is the ugly truth. Define "unauthorised". If a transaction was made using your credentials, then that was surely you unless you have a cast iron defence, like not being able to access cash machines on two continents five minutes apart...
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