It’s notable that there were ShinyHunters members arrested by the FBI a few years ago. I was in prison with Sebastian Raoult, one of them. We talked quite a bit.
The level of persistence these guys went through to phish at scale is astounding—which is how they gained most of their access. They’d otherwise look up API endpoints on GitHub and see if there were any leaked keys (he wasn’t fond of GitHub's automated scanner).
Generally speaking, humans are more often than not the weakest link the chain when it comes to cyber security, so the fact that most of their access comes from social engineering isn't the least bit surprising.
They themselves are likely to some extent the victims of social engineering as well. After all who benefits from creating exploits for online games and getting children to become script kiddies? Its easier (and probably safer) to make money off of cyber crime if your role isn't committing the crimes yourself. It isn't illegal to create premium software that could in theory be use for crime if you don't market it that way.
I'm not sure this is very fair because humans are often not given the right tools to make a good decision. For example:
To gift to a 529 regardless of the financial institution, you go to some random ugift529.com site and put in a code plus all your financial info. This is considered the gold standard.
To get a payout from a class-action lawsuit that leaked your data, you must go to some other random site (usually some random domain name loosely related to the settlement recently registered by kroll) and enter basically more PII than was leaked in the first place.
To pay your fed taxes with a credit card, you must verify your identity with some 3rd party site, then go to yet another 3rd party site to enter your CC info.
This is insane and forces/trains people to perform actions that in many other scenarios lead to a phishing attack.
Reminds me of a co-founder of an adtech company I know. They are a platform that buys inventory using automated trading, mostly mobile, and they realized that most of their customers were all clickfraud / scammers / etc. He didn’t want to go into too much detail.
But he shrugged it off.
I bet there are quite a few shops online that may sell gift cards that are used in money laundering schemes. Bonus points if they accept bitcoin.
But those are all quite implicitly used by cybercrime. I can imagine there are quite a few tools at their disposal that are much more explicit.
I worked at a $xxxB company that had an internal red team. They ran almost as a separate company but were housed in one of our offices.
I was involved in probably 15 operations with them while I was there. They would usually get C&C within six hours, every single time it was phishing lol.
Insofar as every security mechanism was made by a human, yes.
But if we're holding users accountable because 1 out of every 100 clicks a link in a phishing email like clockwork, we're bad at both statistics and security.
>It isn't illegal to create premium software that could in theory be use for crime if you don't market it that way.
Who is making money off of selling premium software, that's not marketed as for cybercrime, to non-governmental attackers? Wouldn't the attackers just pirate it?
Do you mean they thought the scanner was effective and weren't fond of it because it disrupted their business? Or do you mean they had a low opinion of the scanner because it was ineffective?
He would complain that it disrupted their business, and that it doesn't catch all keys—it catches the big ones that he certainly found to be very valuable.
damn that sucks they threw you in fed prison for running a sports streaming website.
did you have bulletproof hosting and they caught you through other means like going after your payment providers or you made opsec mistakes or how exactly?
was it a website like Sportsurge where it simply linked to streams or did it actually host the streams?
> We are sorry. We regret that this incident has caused worry for our partners and people. We have begun the process to identify and contact those impacted and are working closely with law enforcement and the relevant regulators. We are fully committed to maintaining your trust.
I know there will by a bunch of cynics who say that an LLM or a PR crisis team wrote this post... but if they did, hats off. It is powerful and moving. This guys really falls on his sword / takes it on the chin.
I'll never not think of that South Park scene where they mocked BP's "We're so sorry" statement whenever I see one of those. I don't care if you're sorry or if you realize how much you betrayed your customers. Tell me how you investigated the root causes of the incident and how the results will prevent this scenario from ever happening again. Like, how many other deprecated third party systems were identified handling a significant portion of your customer data after this hack? Who declined to allocate the necessary budget to keep systems updated? That's the only way I will even consider giving some trust back. If you really want to apologise, start handing out cash or whatever to the people you betrayed. But mere words like these are absolutely meaningless in today's world. People are right to dismiss them.
I wouldn't be so quick. Everybody gets hacked, sooner or later. Whether they'll own up to it or not is what makes the difference and I've seen far, far worse than this response by Checkout.com, it seems to be one of the better responses to such an event that I've seen to date.
> Like, how many other deprecated third party systems were identified handling a significant portion of your customer data after this hack?
The problem with that is that you'll never know. Because you'd have to audit each and every service provider and I think only Ebay does that. And they're not exactly a paragon of virtue either.
> Who declined to allocate the necessary budget to keep systems updated?
See: prevention paradox. Until this sinks in it will happen over and over again.
> But mere words like these are absolutely meaningless in today's world. People are right to dismiss them.
Again, yes, but: they are at least attempting to use the right words. Now they need to follow them up with the right actions.
The intent of the South Park sketch was to lampoon that BP were (/are) willingly doing awful things and then give corpo apology statements when caught.
Here, Checkout has been the victim of a crime, just as much as their impacted customers. It’s a loss for everyone involved except the perpetrators. Using words like “betrayed” as if Checkout wilfully mislead its customers, is a heavy accusation to level.
At a point, all you can do is apologise, offer compensation if possible, and plot out how you’re going to prevent it going forward.
In attacks on software systems specifically though, I always find this aggressive stance toward the victimized business odd, especially when otherwise reasonable security standards have been met. You simply cannot plug all holes.
As AI tools accelerate hacking capabilities, at what point do we seriously start going after the attackers across borders and stop blaming the victimized businesses?
We solved this in the past. Let’s say you ran a brick-and-mortar business, and even though you secured your sensitive customer paperwork in a locked safe (which most probably didn’t), someone broke into the building and cracked the safe with industrial-grade drilling equipment.
You would rightly focus your ire and efforts on the perpetrators, and not say ”gahhh what an evil dumb business, you didn’t think to install a safe of at least 1 meter thick titanium to protect against industrial grade drilling!????”
If we want to have nice things going forward, the solution is going to have to involve much more aggressive cybercrime enforcement globally. If 100,000 North Koreans landed on the shores of Los Angeles and began looting en masse, the solution would not be to have everybody build medieval stone fortresses around their homes.
What you request is for them to divulge internal details of their architecture that could lead to additional compromise as well as admission of fault that could make it easier for them to be sued. All for some intangible moral notion. No business leader would ever do those things.
Haha, yes, this is entirely what I expected. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the GP because internet commentators always find a reason that some statement is imperfect.
Indeed, an apology is bad and no apology is also bad. In fact, all things are bad. Haha! Absolutely prime.
Right. Transparency doesn't mean telling about the attack that already happened. It means telling us about their issues and ways this could happen again. And they didn't even mention the investment amount for the security labs.
No trolling on my side, I think having people who think just like you is a triumph for humanity. As we approach times far darker and manipulation takes smarter shapes, a cynical mind is worth many trophies.
> prevent this scenario from ever happening again.
Every additional nine of not getting hacked takes effort. Getting to 100% takes infinite effort i.e. is impossible. Trying to achieve the impossible will make you spin on the spot chasing ever more obscure solutions.
As soon as you understand a potential solution enough to implement it you also understand that it cannot achieve the impossible. If you keep insisting on achieving the impossible you have to abandon this potential solution and pin your hope on something you don't understand yet. And so the cycle repeats.
It is good to hold people accountable but only demand the impossible from those you want to go crazy.
They are donating the entire ransom amount to two universities for security research. I don't care about the words themselves, but assuming they're not outright lying about this, that meant a lot to me. They are putting their (corporate!) money where their mouth is.
Words are cheap, but "We are sorry." is a surprisingly rare thing for a company to say (they will usually sugarcoat it, shift blame, add qualifiers, use weasel words, etc.), so it's refreshing to hear that.
This is a classic example of a fake apology: "We regret that this incident has caused worry for our partners and people" they are not really "sorry" that data was stolen but only "regret" that their partners are worried. No word on how they will prevent this in the future and how it even happened. Instead it gets downplayed ("legacy third-party","less than 25% were affected" (which is a huge number), no word on what data exactly).
"We will pay $500,000 to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators. If the perpetrators can be clearly identified but are not in a country which extradites to or from the United States, we will pay $500,000 for their heads."
You're not allowed to sponsor the murder of people in other countries just because they won't extradite to your country. If you did this from within the US, the federal government and probably whatever state you live in would rightfully consider this murder for hire.
Your recourse within US law is to petition the government to do something about it. Negotiate extradition. Go to war. Etc.
I like you like this. For me it’s close but fails in the word selection in the last sentence: “maintaining” trust is not what I would say their job is at this point, it’s “restoring” it.
One places the company at the center as the important point of reference, avoiding some responsibility. The other places the customer at the center, taking responsibility.
If i was a customer id be pissed off, but this is as good as a response you can have to an incident like this.
- timely response
- initial disclosure by company and not third party
- actual expression of shame and remorse
- a decent explanation of target/scope
i could imagine being cyclical about the statement, but look at other companies who have gotten breached in the past. very few of them do well on all points
If we just let the companies go away with 'we are sorry' and say that is as good as it gets, then this industry is up for far more catastrophic situations in the future. Criminal liability, refunds to customers, requirements from regulators might move things in the right direction, but letting companies have shitty practices by hoarding data they don't need and putting customers at risk is definitely something that should be looked at with more scrutiny.
It depends on the crime though right? This was all legacy data and from the description the worst thing they got was contact information that's five years older or more ("internal operational documents and merchant onboarding materials at that time.").
For that level of breach their response seems about right to me, especially waving the money in ShinyHunters' face before giving it away to their enemies.
Timely in what way? Seems they didn't discover the hack themselves, didn't discover it until the hackers themselves reached out last week, and today we're seeing them acknowledging it. I'm not sure anything here could be described as "timely".
I have been doing a self Have I Been Pwned audit and, reading many company blog posts, and it wasn't uncommon to see disclosure months after incidents.
> as good as a response you can have to an incident like this.
From customer perspective “in an effort to reduce the likelihood of this data becoming widely available, we’ve paid the ransom” is probably better, even if some people will not like it.
Also to really be transparent it’d be good to post a detailed postmortem along with audit results detailing other problems they (most likely) discovered.
No, that would not help me as a customer. Because I would never believe that that party would keep their word, besides, it can't be verified. You'll have that shadow hanging around for ever. The good thing is that those assholes now have less budget to go after the next party. The herd is safe from wolves by standing together, not by trying to see which of their number should be sacrificed next.
You mean as a customer you'd feel better if the company victim of ransom would help fund the very group that put the business and your data in jeopardy?
The donation is more or less virtue signaling rather than actual insight.
The problem can not be helped by research research against cybercrime. Proper practices for protections are well established and known, they just need to be implemented.
The amount donated should've rather be invested into better protections / hiring a person responsible in the company.
(Context: The hack happened on a not properly decomissioned legacy system.)
> The donation is more or less virtue signalling rather than actual insight.
I see it more as a middle finger to the perps: “look, we can afford to pay, here, see us pay that amount elsewhere, but you aren't getting it”. It isn't signalling virtue as much as it is signalling “fuck you and your ransom demands” in the hope that this will mark them as not an easy target for that sort of thing in future.
It also serves as a proxy for a punishment. They are, from one perspective, paying a voluntary fine based on their own assessment of their security failings.
For customers it signals sincerity and may help dampen outrage in their follow up dealings.
Yes but I think it's a good virtue to signal considering the circumstances. If they paid the ransom that would signal that ransoming this company works, incentivizing more ransoms. If they refuse to pay the ransom it might signal that they care more about money than they do integrity. Taking the financial hit of the ransom, but paying it to something that signals their values, is about the best move I can imagine.
What is the problem with virtue signaling? By all means signal virtue! Perhaps you are concerned by cheap virtue signals, which have little significance.
The point here is that this is an expensive virtue signal. Although, it would be more effective if we knew how expensive it was.
Virtue signaling is an insult that you can for example use against greenwashing or against someone who pledged to donate a lot of money to some charity but actually donated none or much less.
Hypocrisy is also a form of virtue signaling.
It's also a term you can use against political opponents because it's much easier to speak well than to actually do good.
Refusing to negociate with criminals and help fund security seems like the proper long-term reaction for everyone.
Requiring everyone to implement proper practices is one way of addressing the problem, I might call it Sisyphean & impossible.
Making it illegal to pay ransom is likely a much easier to implement and more effective solution.
And this isn’t virtue signaling - they literally did the virtuous thing that is better for society at the expense of their bottom line. That is just virtue.
It is virtue signaling, especially considering the fact that doing the hard to swallow thing of paying the ransom would probably be the best outcome from a customer perspective.
Yes there are negative externalities in funding ransomware operations, not paying is still much more likely to hurt your customers than paying.
Doing the positive externality thing at expense of your bottom line is to be praised. It is not ‘virtue signaling’ - it is actually doing a virtuous thing.
Paying ransomware fines is never the smart move to do unless you happen to trust what cyber criminals tell you.
You send them the payment, they tell you they deleted the data, but they also sell the data to 10 other customers over the dark-web.
Why would you ever trust people who are inherently trustworthy and who are trying to screw you? While also encouraging further ransomware crimes in the future.
Sidenote, it's interesting how the term "virtue signaling" is arguably objectively an individualistic right-wing dog whistle these days.
I would argue that it is being used all over the media to complain about anyone showing any signs of not being purely individualistic, as if individualism is the only true thing people actually honestly feel. This is obviously incorrect, empathy, professionalism, a desire for a sense of purpose, are all things that people objectively feel in the real world, everyday, everywhere.
I would argue that the expression "virtue signaling" is used systematically in individualistic right wing media by the right about anyone who say, for example, that they care about minorities or less fortunate people or to take action to support them, as if it was false. I would argue that this is harmful.
People do care a good fraction of the time, and they should be recognized for their positive actions, and encouraged. I would argue that we should definitely strive for a culture where individualism is not seen as the only true emotion that people can feel.
So, knowing the negative political and philosophical baggage, I would not use that expression, especially if you don't have actual proof that they don't care about security, professionalism, etc.
Refusing to pay a ransom and instead giving the money to the "ennemies" of the attackers isn't "virtue signaling" (as someone already commented: it's a "fuck you" to the attackers).
In french we call that a "pied de nez". "Turning the table" / "Poetic justice" / "Adding insult to injury" would all be more correct than "virtue signalling".
If there was no attacker and the company gave half a mil out of nowhere to a security company (or a charity) and boasted publicly about it, that would be virtue signalling.
But refusing to pay the ransom and giving the exact same amount to security researchers is just a big, giant, middle finger.
> If companies want security, they should pay for security.
Or just properly follow best-practise, and their own procedures, internally.⁰
That was the failing here, which in an unusual act of honesty they are taking responsibility for in this matter.
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[0] That might be considered paying for security, indirectly, as it means having the resources available to make sure these things are done, and tracked so it can be proven they are done making slips difficult to happen and easy to track & hopefully rectify when they inevitably still do.
The whole codebase & tools at whatever company I ever worked at was using 99% legacy stuff. Its wild...
Often times it would have been easier to rebuild the whole project over trying to upgrade 5-6 year old dependencies.
Ultimately the companies do not care about these kinda incidents. They say sorry, everyone laughs at them for a week and then after its business as usual, with that one thing fixed and still rolling legacy stuff for everything else.
For all their boasting, I can't help but wonder how their response would have been different if the attackers actually had gotten their hands on sensitive data.
I dont understand some of the cynicism in this thread. This is a bold move and I support. It is impossible to not have incidents like this and until
theres a proper post mortem we wont really know how much of it can be attributed to carelessness. They could have just kept is hush hush but I appreciate that they came forward with it and also donated money to academia. The research will be open and everybody benefits.
Cynicism? The post they published is blaming the 3rd party and "legacy" bs. They are talking about "credit cards are safe," but 25 god damn percent of their merchants' data have been leaked. This is messed u, and they play it cool by saying "we donated money because the issue wasn't o big deal". I read that posts as a professional deflection.
"The system was used for internal operational documents and merchant onboarding materials at that time"
To me it seems most likely that this is data collected during the KYC process during onboarding, meaning company documents, director passport or ID card scans, those kind of things. So the risk here for at least a few more years until all identity documents have expired is identity theft possibilities (e.g. fraudsters registering their company with another PSP using the stolen documents and then processing fraudulent payments until they get shut down, or signing up for bank accounts using their info and tax id).
>So the risk here for at least a few more years until all identity documents have expired is identity theft possibilities
Essentially nobody checks the validity of document numbers, there’s rarely any automated mechanism to do this. You could just photoshop the expiry dates on the documents and use them for years and years, even if document designs changed you could just transplant the info from the old document into a new template.
So no, documents expiring does mostly nothing to alleviate identity theft risks in most of the world.
And anyway, targeted phishing attacks are of much much higher severity than identity theft. From this data you can probably gather everything you’d need to perform rather high quality phishing attacks against the bank accounts of checkout.com clients, easily causing tens or hundreds of millions of losses that would never be recovered.
Passport or ID card scans would never be be stored alongside general KYB information, e.g. the standard forms PSPs use.
If you read between the lines of the verbiage here, it looks like a general archived dropbox of stuff like PDF documents which the onboarding team used.
Since GDPR etc, items like passports, driving license data etc, has been kept in far more secure areas that low-level staff (e.g. people doing merchant onboarding) won't have easy access to.
I could be wrong but I would be fairly surprised if JPGs of passports were kept alongside docx files of merchant onboarding questionnaires.
> Passport or ID card scans would never be be stored alongside general KYB information
How do you qualify this statement? Did you mean “should never”? Even then, you’re likely overstating things. Nothing prevents co-locating KYC/KYB information. On the contrary, most businesses conducting KYB are required to conduct UBO and they’re trained to combine them both. Register as a director/officer with any FSI in North America and you’ll see.
Why would merchants fill out docx files? They would submit an online form with their business, director and UBO details, that data would be stored in the Checkout.com merchants database, and any supporting documents like passport scans would be stored in a cloud storage system, just like the one that got hacked.
If it was just some internal PDFs used by the onboarding team, probably they wouldn't make such a big announcement.
They are downplaying the severity of the data theft, which most likely includes user identification documents, the most dangerous type of breach, since it directly enables identity theft
Reading between the lines reveals the severity they're obfuscating, with contradictions:
> This incident has not impacted our payment processing platform. The threat actors do not have, and never had, access to merchant funds or card numbers.
> The system was used for internal operational documents and merchant onboarding materials at that time.
> We have begun the process to identify and contact those impacted and are working closely with law enforcement and the relevant regulators
They stress that "merchant funds or card numbers" weren't accessed, yet acknowledge contacting "impacted" users, this begs the question: how can users be meaningfully "impacted" by mere onboarding paperwork?
Readit News
The level of persistence these guys went through to phish at scale is astounding—which is how they gained most of their access. They’d otherwise look up API endpoints on GitHub and see if there were any leaked keys (he wasn’t fond of GitHub's automated scanner).
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/member-notorious-intern...
They themselves are likely to some extent the victims of social engineering as well. After all who benefits from creating exploits for online games and getting children to become script kiddies? Its easier (and probably safer) to make money off of cyber crime if your role isn't committing the crimes yourself. It isn't illegal to create premium software that could in theory be use for crime if you don't market it that way.
To gift to a 529 regardless of the financial institution, you go to some random ugift529.com site and put in a code plus all your financial info. This is considered the gold standard.
To get a payout from a class-action lawsuit that leaked your data, you must go to some other random site (usually some random domain name loosely related to the settlement recently registered by kroll) and enter basically more PII than was leaked in the first place.
To pay your fed taxes with a credit card, you must verify your identity with some 3rd party site, then go to yet another 3rd party site to enter your CC info.
This is insane and forces/trains people to perform actions that in many other scenarios lead to a phishing attack.
But he shrugged it off.
I bet there are quite a few shops online that may sell gift cards that are used in money laundering schemes. Bonus points if they accept bitcoin.
But those are all quite implicitly used by cybercrime. I can imagine there are quite a few tools at their disposal that are much more explicit.
I was involved in probably 15 operations with them while I was there. They would usually get C&C within six hours, every single time it was phishing lol.
But if we're holding users accountable because 1 out of every 100 clicks a link in a phishing email like clockwork, we're bad at both statistics and security.
Who is making money off of selling premium software, that's not marketed as for cybercrime, to non-governmental attackers? Wouldn't the attackers just pirate it?
Deleted Comment
Do you mean they thought the scanner was effective and weren't fond of it because it disrupted their business? Or do you mean they had a low opinion of the scanner because it was ineffective?
did you have bulletproof hosting and they caught you through other means like going after your payment providers or you made opsec mistakes or how exactly?
was it a website like Sportsurge where it simply linked to streams or did it actually host the streams?
explain
Dead Comment
> Like, how many other deprecated third party systems were identified handling a significant portion of your customer data after this hack?
The problem with that is that you'll never know. Because you'd have to audit each and every service provider and I think only Ebay does that. And they're not exactly a paragon of virtue either.
> Who declined to allocate the necessary budget to keep systems updated?
See: prevention paradox. Until this sinks in it will happen over and over again.
> But mere words like these are absolutely meaningless in today's world. People are right to dismiss them.
Again, yes, but: they are at least attempting to use the right words. Now they need to follow them up with the right actions.
Here, Checkout has been the victim of a crime, just as much as their impacted customers. It’s a loss for everyone involved except the perpetrators. Using words like “betrayed” as if Checkout wilfully mislead its customers, is a heavy accusation to level.
At a point, all you can do is apologise, offer compensation if possible, and plot out how you’re going to prevent it going forward.
As AI tools accelerate hacking capabilities, at what point do we seriously start going after the attackers across borders and stop blaming the victimized businesses?
We solved this in the past. Let’s say you ran a brick-and-mortar business, and even though you secured your sensitive customer paperwork in a locked safe (which most probably didn’t), someone broke into the building and cracked the safe with industrial-grade drilling equipment.
You would rightly focus your ire and efforts on the perpetrators, and not say ”gahhh what an evil dumb business, you didn’t think to install a safe of at least 1 meter thick titanium to protect against industrial grade drilling!????”
If we want to have nice things going forward, the solution is going to have to involve much more aggressive cybercrime enforcement globally. If 100,000 North Koreans landed on the shores of Los Angeles and began looting en masse, the solution would not be to have everybody build medieval stone fortresses around their homes.
Indeed, an apology is bad and no apology is also bad. In fact, all things are bad. Haha! Absolutely prime.
Every additional nine of not getting hacked takes effort. Getting to 100% takes infinite effort i.e. is impossible. Trying to achieve the impossible will make you spin on the spot chasing ever more obscure solutions.
As soon as you understand a potential solution enough to implement it you also understand that it cannot achieve the impossible. If you keep insisting on achieving the impossible you have to abandon this potential solution and pin your hope on something you don't understand yet. And so the cycle repeats.
It is good to hold people accountable but only demand the impossible from those you want to go crazy.
We are fully committed to rebuilding your trust.
"We will pay $500,000 to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators. If the perpetrators can be clearly identified but are not in a country which extradites to or from the United States, we will pay $500,000 for their heads."
Your recourse within US law is to petition the government to do something about it. Negotiate extradition. Go to war. Etc.
One places the company at the center as the important point of reference, avoiding some responsibility. The other places the customer at the center, taking responsibility.
Deleted Comment
- timely response
- initial disclosure by company and not third party
- actual expression of shame and remorse
- a decent explanation of target/scope
i could imagine being cyclical about the statement, but look at other companies who have gotten breached in the past. very few of them do well on all points
For that level of breach their response seems about right to me, especially waving the money in ShinyHunters' face before giving it away to their enemies.
Timely in what way? Seems they didn't discover the hack themselves, didn't discover it until the hackers themselves reached out last week, and today we're seeing them acknowledging it. I'm not sure anything here could be described as "timely".
From customer perspective “in an effort to reduce the likelihood of this data becoming widely available, we’ve paid the ransom” is probably better, even if some people will not like it.
Also to really be transparent it’d be good to post a detailed postmortem along with audit results detailing other problems they (most likely) discovered.
The extortionist knows they cannot prove they destroyed the data, so they will eventually sell it anyway.
They will maybe hold off for a bit to prove their "reputation" or "legitimacy". Just don't pay.
The problem can not be helped by research research against cybercrime. Proper practices for protections are well established and known, they just need to be implemented.
The amount donated should've rather be invested into better protections / hiring a person responsible in the company.
(Context: The hack happened on a not properly decomissioned legacy system.)
I see it more as a middle finger to the perps: “look, we can afford to pay, here, see us pay that amount elsewhere, but you aren't getting it”. It isn't signalling virtue as much as it is signalling “fuck you and your ransom demands” in the hope that this will mark them as not an easy target for that sort of thing in future.
For customers it signals sincerity and may help dampen outrage in their follow up dealings.
The point here is that this is an expensive virtue signal. Although, it would be more effective if we knew how expensive it was.
It's also a term you can use against political opponents because it's much easier to speak well than to actually do good.
Refusing to negociate with criminals and help fund security seems like the proper long-term reaction for everyone.
Making it illegal to pay ransom is likely a much easier to implement and more effective solution.
And this isn’t virtue signaling - they literally did the virtuous thing that is better for society at the expense of their bottom line. That is just virtue.
Yes there are negative externalities in funding ransomware operations, not paying is still much more likely to hurt your customers than paying.
You send them the payment, they tell you they deleted the data, but they also sell the data to 10 other customers over the dark-web.
Why would you ever trust people who are inherently trustworthy and who are trying to screw you? While also encouraging further ransomware crimes in the future.
I would argue that it is being used all over the media to complain about anyone showing any signs of not being purely individualistic, as if individualism is the only true thing people actually honestly feel. This is obviously incorrect, empathy, professionalism, a desire for a sense of purpose, are all things that people objectively feel in the real world, everyday, everywhere.
I would argue that the expression "virtue signaling" is used systematically in individualistic right wing media by the right about anyone who say, for example, that they care about minorities or less fortunate people or to take action to support them, as if it was false. I would argue that this is harmful.
People do care a good fraction of the time, and they should be recognized for their positive actions, and encouraged. I would argue that we should definitely strive for a culture where individualism is not seen as the only true emotion that people can feel.
So, knowing the negative political and philosophical baggage, I would not use that expression, especially if you don't have actual proof that they don't care about security, professionalism, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xllIU0lPgqs
Endpoint security is a well known open problem for what no sufficient practices and protections exist.
In french we call that a "pied de nez". "Turning the table" / "Poetic justice" / "Adding insult to injury" would all be more correct than "virtue signalling".
If there was no attacker and the company gave half a mil out of nowhere to a security company (or a charity) and boasted publicly about it, that would be virtue signalling.
But refusing to pay the ransom and giving the exact same amount to security researchers is just a big, giant, middle finger.
And a middle finger ain't no virtue signalling.
Or just properly follow best-practise, and their own procedures, internally.⁰
That was the failing here, which in an unusual act of honesty they are taking responsibility for in this matter.
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[0] That might be considered paying for security, indirectly, as it means having the resources available to make sure these things are done, and tracked so it can be proven they are done making slips difficult to happen and easy to track & hopefully rectify when they inevitably still do.
Deleted Comment
I think the answer is ok but the "third-party" bit reads like trying to deflect part of the blame on the cloud storage provider.
Often times it would have been easier to rebuild the whole project over trying to upgrade 5-6 year old dependencies.
Ultimately the companies do not care about these kinda incidents. They say sorry, everyone laughs at them for a week and then after its business as usual, with that one thing fixed and still rolling legacy stuff for everything else.
All work created by a company decays, it's legacy code within months.
Sure buddy, sure
To me it seems most likely that this is data collected during the KYC process during onboarding, meaning company documents, director passport or ID card scans, those kind of things. So the risk here for at least a few more years until all identity documents have expired is identity theft possibilities (e.g. fraudsters registering their company with another PSP using the stolen documents and then processing fraudulent payments until they get shut down, or signing up for bank accounts using their info and tax id).
Essentially nobody checks the validity of document numbers, there’s rarely any automated mechanism to do this. You could just photoshop the expiry dates on the documents and use them for years and years, even if document designs changed you could just transplant the info from the old document into a new template.
So no, documents expiring does mostly nothing to alleviate identity theft risks in most of the world.
And anyway, targeted phishing attacks are of much much higher severity than identity theft. From this data you can probably gather everything you’d need to perform rather high quality phishing attacks against the bank accounts of checkout.com clients, easily causing tens or hundreds of millions of losses that would never be recovered.
If you read between the lines of the verbiage here, it looks like a general archived dropbox of stuff like PDF documents which the onboarding team used.
Since GDPR etc, items like passports, driving license data etc, has been kept in far more secure areas that low-level staff (e.g. people doing merchant onboarding) won't have easy access to.
I could be wrong but I would be fairly surprised if JPGs of passports were kept alongside docx files of merchant onboarding questionnaires.
How do you qualify this statement? Did you mean “should never”? Even then, you’re likely overstating things. Nothing prevents co-locating KYC/KYB information. On the contrary, most businesses conducting KYB are required to conduct UBO and they’re trained to combine them both. Register as a director/officer with any FSI in North America and you’ll see.
Why would merchants fill out docx files? They would submit an online form with their business, director and UBO details, that data would be stored in the Checkout.com merchants database, and any supporting documents like passport scans would be stored in a cloud storage system, just like the one that got hacked.
If it was just some internal PDFs used by the onboarding team, probably they wouldn't make such a big announcement.
Reading between the lines reveals the severity they're obfuscating, with contradictions:
> This incident has not impacted our payment processing platform. The threat actors do not have, and never had, access to merchant funds or card numbers.
> The system was used for internal operational documents and merchant onboarding materials at that time.
> We have begun the process to identify and contact those impacted and are working closely with law enforcement and the relevant regulators
They stress that "merchant funds or card numbers" weren't accessed, yet acknowledge contacting "impacted" users, this begs the question: how can users be meaningfully "impacted" by mere onboarding paperwork?