JPMorgan Chase, one of the world’s biggest Banks has recently announced that it was the victim of acyber attack and warned round 465,000 of its holders of prepaid cash cards on the possible exposure of their personal information.
In the Security Breach that took place on the bank’s website www.ucard.chase.com in July, around 465,000 accounts are compromised i.e. 2% of the overall 25 million UCard users. JPMorgan confirmed that there is no risk for holders of debit cards, credit cards or prepaid Liquid cards.
They informed the law enforcement in September, and till now no information on how attackers have conducted the attack has been disclosed.
The JPMorgan spokesman Michael Fusco declared that the investigation allowed the identification of victim accounts and the data stolen, the bankalready notifying the cardholders of the incident.
JPMorgan representative also remarked that hackers haven't stolen money from any user's account, due this reason the company is not issuing replacement cards but is only offering the cardholders a year of free credit-monitoring services.
"The bank typically keeps the personal information of its customers encrypted, or scrambled, as a security precaution. However, during the course of the breach, personal data belonging to those customers had temporarily appeared in plain text in files the computers use to log activity." reported the Reutersagency.
I confess that the above statement made me literally jump out of the chair, what does it mean that "customers had temporarily appeared in plain text in files the computers use to log activity", if confirmed the situation is very embarrassing.
The bank experts sustain that only "a small amount" of data was exposed during the data breach , the information according the company doesn't include social security numbers and other personal information like birth dates and email addresses that could be used by cyber criminals for financial frauds and identity theft.
At the moment there is an absolute reserve on the names of the victims and there is no idea on the origin of the attack. The cybercrime considers the type of information acquired a precious commodity for sale in the underground, security experts Stewart from Dell SecureWorks and independent researcher David Shearhave recently published a study on the online underground marketplace for stolen data, the analysis revealed for example that it is quite easy to buy credit card information for a little more than ten dollars.
In 2007 some 41 million credit and debit card numbers from major retailers, including the owner of T.J.Maxx stores, were stolen. It is just the beginning!
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