FC: Ziff Davis, Playboy websites give up credit card numbers

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

The Ziff Davis Media address in question that was taken offline but went 
back up today even after my article appeared:
http://www.zdmcirc.com/formcollect/ebxbegamfile.dat

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http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,48525,00.html

   A Tell-All ZD Would Rather Ignore
   By Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
   2:00 a.m. Nov. 20, 2001 PST

   If you subscribe to any of Ziff Davis' computer magazines, you may
   want to double-check your credit card bill next month.

   Ziff Davis Media, which publishes such popular tech titles such as
   Yahoo Internet Life and PC Magazine, accidentally posted the personal
   information of about 12,500 magazine subscribers on its website.

   On Monday, Ziff Davis removed the data, which included hundreds of
   credit card numbers, and said its engineers had taken steps to prevent
   additional security leaks.

   [...]

*********

http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/11/20/playboy.hacked/index.html
Hackers access Playboy.com's credit card data
2001-11-20 15:40:07

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Computer hackers broke into the Playboy Enterprises'
Web site -- playboy.com -- gaining access to the credit card numbers
of several customers, a company spokeswoman said Tuesday. The
company's technology team discovered the breach last weekend before
the hackers sent threatening e-mails to the company's customers, said
Playboy spokeswoman Laura Sigman.
[...]

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Delivered-To: *******@POWERSURFR.com
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 20:56:23 GMT
From: hef () playboy com


To: *******@POWERSURFR.COMFrom: Hugh Hefner <hef () playboy com>
Subject: ingreslock 1524 security announcement


dear user,


since the summer of 1998, a shady hacker group known as 'ingreslock 1524' have
maintained full access to the playboy enterprises inc. (pei) corporate network.
even when the pei websites were defaced by BoW/H4G1S and were 'secured', we
retained our full access (no, installing ssh doesn't make you secure).


we did have some very big plans to use the hundreds of thousands of customer
details (names, addresses, order history & credit card information) harvested
to automatically purchase hundreds of different products from different online
companies (amazon, barnesandnoble, qvc, yahoo, even playboy) to be sent to each
playboy customer, thus resulting in over 10 million dollars worth of fraud
claims being made to credit card and in turn, insurance companies globally.


incase you think this is some kind of hoax, we have included your personal
details below -


Name - ******* Credit Card Number & Expiry - *******


your details are currently circulating the underworld of anarchists and
credit card fraudsters, so we highly recommend that you contact your bank
before much fraud is committed. we have also distributed over a million e-mail
addresses to marketing and 'spam' organisations, so you will certainly have a
lot of fun deleting unwanted e-mail into the future!


online companies can learn many lessons from this compromise -
1. do not use the same root or administrative (oracle, webserv, etc.) user
   passwords across different hosts on the same network.
2. never assume that by installing the latest security patches and installing
   ssh, that you are secure.
3. do not use insecure authentication methods, including nis, nis+ or .rhosts.
4. do not protect your passwords with des in your shadow files, use md5.


end users can learn an important lesson from this compromise -
1. do not trust companies with your details online.


its been emotional. we'd like to thank the playboy systems team for providing
us with an interesting and challenging target. i'm sure that a big security
company will make easy money auditing their systems and hopefully deploying
a more secure network - although we'll be back to test it again.


- m4rty


martyn luther ping
minister of information
ingreslock 1524


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