ForHacSec

ForHacSec.com published an article earlier this month about Popular UK-based biking site ChainReactionCycles.com who’s website appears, according to mountain bike forums, to have been breached and customers credit card data made vulnerable.

Today, it has been confirmed that a security breach on its systems led to fraud against its customers.

Some of the cyclists who shopped with the site earlier this month noticed fraudulent transactions against their credit cards days after using the site, normally fraudulent purchases of mobile phone top-ups (often from telecommunications provider 02) costing around £30.

The common factor behind these fraudulent transactions quickly emerged, largely via discussions on bike enthusiast forums, as recent purchases from the North Ireland-based cycle outfit chainreactioncycles.com were discussed.

Chain Reaction Cycles (CRC) responded to the reports by calling in outside help and launching an investigation. Security experts have since identified a problem on CRC’s systems that is likely to have resulted in the security breach and subsequent fraud.

CRC has plugged the hole and tightened up its systems. In an email to some customers, CRC apologised for the inconvenience and offered a goodwill gesture of a free £30 voucher to affected customers.

According to popular tech news site ‘TheRegister’ CRC have stated –

“The independent forensic investigation has shown that our infrastructure was the target of a sophisticated attack which resulted in the theft of card details relating to a number of our customers.

Details we being stolen ‘real time’ and only a small proportion of recent CRC customers were affected. The access point of the theft has been identified and permanently closed off so we are confident that we have fully addressed any weakness in our infrastructure.”

It would appear that this ‘real time’ breach would indicate some type of Man-in-the-Middle attack on CRC’s system. So, although, complete credit card data (card number, expiry date, card holder and CVV nuber) may not and should not be stored within a payment processing environment in compliance with PCI-DSS, if the data was being intercepted ‘on the wire’ so to speak, it would be difficult to detect and in CRC’s case, prrcent!

Banking regulations in the UK mean that victims should be able to reclaim fraudulently charged purchases, although this may involve a degree of inconvenience and short-term hassle, possibly involving the replacement of compromised cards and a wait until funds are returned.

There is still the issue however of 02 having payment processing systems in place which appear to be a honey pot for would be fraudsters with regards to them using 02’s PAYG payment processing systems in order to make fraudulent transactions to determine whether or not a card is active.

It is nice to see CRC reacting to the issues reported by it’s customers, however, throughout this whole event (over a month in CRC’s case) there website failed to offer any kind of notification with regards to a possible security breach, nor did it shut down it’s e-commerce online payment system or at the very least, force the use of PayPal.