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'Phantom' withdrawal case concludes in U.K. court
A UK judge has ruled in favour of high street bank Halifax in the country's first ever phantom withdrawal lawsuit.
The case was brought by a customer who claimed that fraudsters cloned his chip-based card and withdrew £2100 from his account at ATMs. The judge based his ruling on printouts from log files to show that Job's real card had been used for the transactions.
The suit was filed after two critical pieces of evidence once held by Halifax were destroyed, including the original ATM card and the Authorisation Request Cryptogram that could have proven that the card's chip had been read and authenticated by the machine. The plaintiff Alain Job says he is studying the judgment before deciding whether to appeal the ruling.
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2009 Bankcard Profitability Study: MasterCard Inc.Costly payouts to settle two long-running antitrust cases dampen profits while the economic slowdown begins to affect purchase volume.
MasterCard Worldwide continued to crank out overall debit card payment-volume growth in 2008, but legal issues and the U.S. economic slowdown hurt its overall performance.
In its second full year as an independent company following its initial public offering in 2006, MasterCard finally resolved some long-simmering legal issues.
The company in June reached an agreement to pay American Express Co. up to $1.8 billion to settle an antitrust case dating back to 2004. AmEx's suit, filed in 2004, alleged that MasterCard's and Visa's exclusionary rules prohibiting U.S. financial intuitions from issuing cards on its network hurt its growth opportunities. MasterCard said it would pay the settlement amount in quarterly installments over the next three years.
MasterCard and Visa Inc. reached an agreement to settle Discover Financial Services' similar antitrust suit dating back to 2004 and to share settlement costs. MasterCard's share of the $2.75 billion settlement was $827.5 million, including $35 million Morgan Stanley, Discover's former parent, agreed to pay MasterCard as part of the deal.
Continue Reading at CardForum
Editor's Note: InfoSecCompliance LLC (”ISC”) is a law
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| Available to | Residents of China |
| Card types | Standard only |
| Annual fee | First year free. Annual fee of RMB100 in following years is waived if the card is used at least six times during the prior year. |
| Major functions and services | Select from five card designs. Dual-currency (USD and RMB). Ping An Bank credit card functions and services. JCB international brand functions and services Points earned with the card can be exchanged for original BE@RBICK goods. Access to exclusive cardmember internet site. |
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Report States That Cash Is Still King, But For How Long?
The full Payments Council report issued this month (June 2009) includes data from Link and other industry sources.
2008 cash and cash machine data shows:
- 71% of all cash acquired by consumers came from cash machines.
2.9 billion cash machine withdrawals were made last year - equivalent
to 91 withdrawals per second- Cash payment volumes are forecast to fall by 27% over the next 10 years
- If current trends persist, next year for the first time debit card spending will overtake cash spending by value
Whilst cash spending continues to remain relatively flat, the number of cash machine withdrawals continues to rise and is forecast to peak in 2011. Consumers are increasingly using cash machines for withdrawing cash, where previously they would have withdrawn money in bank branches or at post offices; five years ago only 54% of cash came from cash machines, last year 71% of cash was acquired that way. This shift has been driven by an increase in the availability and numbers of cash machines as well as the migration of payment for state benefits and pensions from cash and girocheque to automated methods.
Continue Reading
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Researchers from Microsoft say stolen goods offered for sale in IRC channels are tough to monetize, and industry estimates of underground profits are "exaggerated"
By Kelly Jackson Higgins | DarkReading
Turns out the profitability of cybercrime may have been greatly exaggerated. According to a new report by two researchers for Microsoft's research organization, cybercrime doesn't equal easy money after all, despite findings to the contrary.
In their report, titled "Nobody Sells Gold for the Price of Silver: Dishonesty, Uncertainty and the Underground Economy," Microsoft researchers Cormac Herley and Dinei Florencio say it's a smaller population of more sophisticated and organized gangs of cybercriminals who come out ahead. "While there is a great deal of activity in the underground economy marketplace, it does not imply a lot of dollars change hands," they wrote in their paper. Lucrative cybercrime doesn't occur in the open IRC space because "rippers," or those who don't deliver the goods and services they "sell" there, damage the market, they say.
The researchers also took on security-vendor research (as well as that of Gartner) that estimates the value of the underground economy based on the price tags of wares sold via IRC: "We believe that anyone who shows up on an IRC channel hoping to trade profitably with anonymous partners is almost certain to be cheated. Thus, estimating the dollar size of the underground economy based on the asking price of goods and services advertised on IRC networks appears unsound," they say. "We find that the published estimates of the dollar value of underground economy IRC channels are exaggerated. They are derived by simply adding the unverified claims of anonymous channel participants (who include rippers). Those who lie most and exaggerate most affect the average most." Continue Dark ReadingCormac Herley and Dinei Florencio
June 2009
Much attention has been devoted recently to the underground economy, and in particular to the IRC markets for stolen identities, phishingkits, botnets, and cybercrime related services. It is suggested that
sophisticated underground markets show great specialization and maturity. There are complex divisions of labor and service offerings for every need. Stolen credentials are traded in bulk for pennies on the dollar. It is suggested that large sums move on these markets.
We argue that this makes very little sense. Using basic arguments from economics we show that the IRC
markets studied represent classic examples of lemon markets. The ever-present rippers who cheat other participants ensure that the market cannot operate effectively. Their presence represents a tax on every transaction. Those who form gangs and alliances avoid this tax, enjoy a lower cost basis and higher profit.
This suggests a two tier underground economy where organization is the route to profit. The IRC markets appear to be the lower tier, and are occupied by those without skills or alliances, newcomers, and those who seek to cheat them. The goods offered for sale on these markets are those that are easy to acquire, but hard to monetize. We find that estimates of the size of the IRC markets are enormously exaggerated. Finally, we find that defenders recruit their own opponents by publicizing exaggerated estimates of the rewards of cybercrime. Those so recruited inhabit the lower tier; they produce very little profit, but contribute greatly to the externalities of cybercrime.
Complete Report: PDF File
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Cash machine virus can steal your PIN | 4 Jun 2009 | ComputerWeekly.comCiff Saran Posted: 04 Jun 2009
The Eastern European cash machine network may be prone to a serious hacking attack, banks have been warned.
SpiderLabs, the security team at Trustwave responsible for incident response and forensics, ethical hacking and application security tests, has investigated security breaches on automated teller machines (ATMs) running Windows XP over the past few months and found the same malware residing on the breached machines."This malware is unlike any we have ever had experience with. It allows the attacker to gain complete control over the ATM to obtain track data, PINs and cash from each infected machine," TrustWave said.
TrustWave found that the malware enables an attacker to steal card data from the ATM's receipt printer or by writing the data to an electronic storage device (possibly using the ATM's card reader). It also discovered code indicating that the malware could eject the cash dispensing cassette.
"We believe the current attack vector is an early version of the malware sample, and future attacks will add functionality such as propagation via the ATM network. If an attacker can gain access to one machine, the malware will evolve and propagate automatically to other systems."
Approximately 20 ATMs have been compromised, primarily located in Eastern Europe. TrustWave expected the attack to spread to the US and other regions of the world. This is not the first time a flaw has been found in cash machines. In January, Cambridge University published a paper on a flaw in chip and Pin readers.Below is a Sample Page from a PDF Report from Trustwave. (click to enlarge)
The Full Report is Available Here
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