UPGRADE – VISA, MASTERCARD and GPN breach

The day is come, yesterday morning as planned Global Payments Inc., the Atlanta-based credit and debit card processor that recently announced a breach that exposed fewer than 1.5 million card accounts, held a conference call to discuss about the breach and its impacts. Again Krebson Security Blog is the more accredited source in my opinion, they have announced the breach for first.

During the conf call Paul Garcia, Chairman and CEO of Global Payments, has focused its discussion on the response of its company in front of the incident, Garcia has remarked that the company itself has reported the breach.

Garcia hasn’t dated the incident to January, like several rumors sustain, declaring that Global Payments has discovered it in early March promptly informing the authorities of the sector. He said:

“There’s a lot of rumor and innuendo out there which is not helpful to anyone, and most of it incredibly inaccurate. In terms of other timelines, I just cannot be specific further about that.”

The information is in contrast with the one proposed by the KrebsOn Security that announced that Visa and MasterCard were warning of a payment processor that had an exposure between Jan 21, 2012 and Feb. 25, 2012.

Garcia also added:

“This does not involve our merchants, our sales partners, or their relationships with their customers. Neither merchant systems, or point of sale devices, were involved in any way. This was self-discovered and self-reported.”

First we must observe the scaling of the figures for the number of cards compromised, initially was hypothesized that the exposed card were about 10 million, the number dropped to 1.5 million today.

Unfortunately Garcia hasn’t provided more information regarding the incident, for this reason many experts have started to search for useful information on internet that could be related to the breach and to its timing collocation.

I desire to report two useful observation made published on KrebsOnSecurity

-For the past two years, GlobalPaymentsInc.com has been hosted at MaximumASP, a hosting provider in Louisville, KY. On Feb. 20, 2012, the company moved its Web site to Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting service. MaximumASP declined to answer questions about possible reasons for the switch, citing customer confidentiality policies.

-The New York Times in a story published Saturday cited unnamed sources saying that this was the second time in a year that Global Payments had experienced a breach. I have heard likewise from an anonymous hacker who claims the company was breached just after the new year in 2011. The hacker said the company’s network was under full criminal control from that time until March 26, 2012. “The data and quantities that was gathered [was] much more than they writed [sic]. They finished End2End encryption, but E2E not a full solution; it only defend [sic] from outside threats.” He went on to claim that hackers had been capturing data from the company’s network for the past 13 months — collecting the data monthly — gathering data on a total of 24 million unique transactions before they were shut out.

When asked if he had evidence that would back up his claims, the hacker produced a Microsoft Word document with Global Payments’s logo entitled “Disaster Recovery Plan TDS US: Loss of the Atlanta Data Center.” The document appears to have been created on May 6, 2010 by Raj Thiruvengadam, who according to LinkedIn.com was an Atlanta-based Oracle database administrator for Global Payments from May 2006 through August 2011.

I asked Global Payments if they could verify the authenticity of the document, but have not yet heard back from them. I will not publish it, as it contains apparently sensitive information about the organization’s internal databases. A screen shot of the title page is below.

The above information give the impression that something has happened a couple of years ago, an event that has prompted both the migration of systems and above all that has necessitated the implementation of a recovery procedure. The info, though consistent, require further study but it is worth pointing out that other companies in the past victims of such incidents have discovered their systems vulnerable long after the real date of the breach.

Crucial is able to date the real involvement of the company and its management to determine if communication has been omitted in the past, an event that would have provided in case of failure in handling breach an advantage to the attackers.

These are all hypotheses that have as their intent, to emphasize the importance of two factors:

• implementation procedures for the technical response to the event.
• media management of the event itself and its communication to business partners.

The two aspects are strongly correlated, the demonstration is that sometimes while managing the incident in an technically impeccable way, the omission of information with third parties can cause extensive damage and trigger dangerous mechanisms that can lead to disastrous consequences.

In the meantime Visa temporary removed Global Payments from its list of “compliant service providers”, leaving open doors to the company once the processor can be aligned again with “Visa’s standards.”

Looking the promblem from the perspective of the customers I can only suggest them to wait the contact from their banks but in the meantime to monitor transactions on their accounts. The risks of counterfeit of credit cards is high.

In the meantime Visa temporary removed Global Payments from its list of “compliant service providers”, leaving open doors to the company once the processor can be aligned again with “Visa’s standards.”

Looking the problem from the perspective of the customers I can only suggest them to wait the contact from their banks but in the meantime to monitor transactions on their accounts. The risks of counterfeit of credit cards is high.  Let’s remind that Global Payments in the statement admitted:

“the investigation to date has revealed that Track 2 card data may have been stolen, but that cardholder names, addresses and social security numbers were not obtained by the criminals.”

But Visa referred ABC News to Global Payments’ announcement that Track 2 data was stolen.  While track 2 is used by the bank for the operation, “Track 1” data generally refers to the information reported on the front of a bank card, so if these information are stolen with that contained in the “Track 2” is possible to clone a card.

Finally I leave you with a thought, the fact that the company did not immediately discovered the amount of cards exposed leaves me thinking that it did not identify with certainty the exposed portion of the system and the agent that made possible the exploitation of the vulnerability .

I think there are more doubts on event than answers, so I hope in the next days we will be able to faithfully reconstruct the events.

Pierluigi Paganini

References

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=125339&p=irol-irhome

http://corporate.visa.com/media-center/index.shtml