Black Friday on the DarkNet

On Nov. 23rd, four million freshly-hacked debit and credit cards were offered for sale on the cybercrime store Joker’s Stash. The data for the counterfeit cards was siphoned from four restaurant chains, mostly in the midwest and eastern United States —  Krystal, Moe’s, McAlister’s Deli and Schlotzsky’s. According to Gemini Advisory, a fraud intelligence company, of the 1,750-plus locations belonging to these restaurants, nearly half were breached and had customer payment card data exposed, with the highest exposure in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Alabama. The actual breaches occurred between July and September. According to KrebsonSecurity, most card breaches at brick-and-mortar stores occur when cybercriminals remotely install malicious software on the retailer’s card-processing systems, often by compromising third-party firms that help manage these systems. Point-of-sale malware can copy data stored on a credit or debit card’s magnetic stripe when they are swiped at compromised payment terminals. That data can then be used to create counterfeit copies of the cards. Chip-based cards are far more expensive and difficult to counterfeit, but many merchants still swipe their customers’ cards.