Remember How TJX Was The Worst Data Breach In History? Well, It Was Actually Worse

from the stunning-incompetence dept

In the last few years, every time a massive data breach is reported, you can be assured of one thing: a few weeks after the initial report comes out, a second report will come out admitting that the breach was worse than previously expected. We saw it with Choicepoint. We saw it with the VA. It seems to always happen. In fact, with the now infamous TJX breach, we'd already mentioned that the problems were worse than originally announced -- making it the largest such breach ever reported. This wasn't surprising once you found out just how incompetent the company was -- failing to comply with nearly all of the credit card company's security guidelines and leaving their entire system wide open to anyone who could hack a simple insecure WEP WiFi system (something that's quite easily done). The data from the breach (unlike many other widely announced breaches) has already been used in numerous frauds, costing upwards of $60 million. With such astounding incompetence and a breach so large, should it come as any surprise that even the updated breach numbers weren't complete? That's right, thanks to documents being filed in the lawsuits against TJX, it's now coming out that the breach has impacted even more people than was earlier announced. Of course, the question still remains whether or not the punishment the company receives will matter. It doesn't seem like anything is really done to stop companies from being so careless, and there's no indication that's going to change in this case either.

Filed Under: breach, security
Companies: tjx

More People Busted With Credit-Card Numbers From TJX Breach

from the cha-ching dept

The Secret Service has busted four people in Florida, and recovered 200,000 credit cards from the TJX breach that was disclosed earlier this year. Recovering the credit-card numbers at this point does little more than link the fraudsters to the breach, but they're said to have been used to rack up more than $75 million in fraudulent charges. The people busted here didn't apparently participate in the theft of the credit-card data, but bought them from "known cybercriminals in Eastern Europe" and then used the numbers to make counterfeit cards. In any case, they're way more productive than another group of Florida scammers busted back in March, who only managed to rack up $8 million worth of goods at Sam's and Wal-Mart. Since banks get left holding the bag for this type of fraud, expect more lawsuits as they look to recover their losses from TJX's astounding level of incompetence.

Filed Under: breach, credit card, security
Companies: tj maxx, tjx