P.F. Chang's Investigates Credit Card Breach
KrebsonSecurity is reporting that, on June 9, thousands of newly-stolen credit and debit cards went up for sale on rescator[dot]so, an underground store best known for selling tens of millions of cards stolen in the Target breach. Several banks contacted by KrebsOnSecurity said they acquired from this new batch multiple cards that were previously issued to customers, and found that all had been used at P.F. Chang’s locations between the beginning of March 2014 and May 19, 2014.
Contacted about the banks’ claims, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based restaurant chain said it has not yet been able to confirm a card breach, but that the company “has been in communications with law enforcement authorities and banks to investigate the source.”
“P.F. Chang’s takes these matters very seriously and is currently investigating the situation, working with the authorities to learn more,” the company said in an emailed statement. “We will provide an update as soon as we have additional information.”
It is unclear how many P.F. Chang’s locations may have been impacted.
The new batch of stolen cards, dubbed “Ronald Reagan” by the card shop’s owner, is the first major glut of cards released for sale on the fraud shop since March 2014, when curators of the crime store advertised the sale of some 282,000 cards stolen from nationwide beauty store chain Sally Beauty.
The items for sale are not cards, per se, but instead data copied from the magnetic stripe on the backs of credit cards. Armed with this information, thieves can re-encode the data onto new plastic and then use the counterfeit cards to buy high-priced items.
The most common way that thieves steal this type of card data is by hacking into cash registers at retail locations and planting malicious software that surreptitiously records mag stripe data when cards are swiped through the machines. The breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels and Sally Beauty all were powered by malware that thieves planted on point-of-sale systems.
Unlike with the Target and Sally Beauty batches, however, the advertisement on Rescator’s shop for cards sold under the Ronald Reagan batch does not list the total number of cards that are for sale currently. Instead, it appears to list just the first 100 pages of results, at approximately 50 cards per page.
Read the full story from Krebs here.
Contacted about the banks’ claims, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based restaurant chain said it has not yet been able to confirm a card breach, but that the company “has been in communications with law enforcement authorities and banks to investigate the source.”
“P.F. Chang’s takes these matters very seriously and is currently investigating the situation, working with the authorities to learn more,” the company said in an emailed statement. “We will provide an update as soon as we have additional information.”
It is unclear how many P.F. Chang’s locations may have been impacted.
The new batch of stolen cards, dubbed “Ronald Reagan” by the card shop’s owner, is the first major glut of cards released for sale on the fraud shop since March 2014, when curators of the crime store advertised the sale of some 282,000 cards stolen from nationwide beauty store chain Sally Beauty.
The items for sale are not cards, per se, but instead data copied from the magnetic stripe on the backs of credit cards. Armed with this information, thieves can re-encode the data onto new plastic and then use the counterfeit cards to buy high-priced items.
The most common way that thieves steal this type of card data is by hacking into cash registers at retail locations and planting malicious software that surreptitiously records mag stripe data when cards are swiped through the machines. The breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels and Sally Beauty all were powered by malware that thieves planted on point-of-sale systems.
Unlike with the Target and Sally Beauty batches, however, the advertisement on Rescator’s shop for cards sold under the Ronald Reagan batch does not list the total number of cards that are for sale currently. Instead, it appears to list just the first 100 pages of results, at approximately 50 cards per page.
Read the full story from Krebs here.