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Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

bleepingcomputer.com

11–20 of 152 posts

Re: Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

#11

> who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental should be rightly and truly f'd for that one. Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules. Delta Dental should have their ability to process credit cards completely revoked for this egregious breach.

It's totally forbidden by PCI rules as well as common sense. Wayyyy back in 2002, I worked at a startup making a billing product. A customer asked for a screen to be able to see CC numbers for their own customers, and our response was a flat no. Any sensitive data was encrypted and sequestered, and security codes were absolutely not stored.

In my current role at a startup, when a conflict between schedule/time or convenience conflicts with proper data security, I ask people to envision how our processes would look as a news headline or would fare in a legal discovery.

Re: Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

#12

> who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental should be rightly and truly f'd for that one. Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules. Delta Dental should have their ability to process credit cards completely revoked for this egregious breach.

Why they are doing their own payments processing is beyond me. Is it just too expensive to use someone like Stripe?

Stripe? Oh yeah. At their scale, they'd likely be talking to Fidelity or some other big player directly.

Re: Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

#13

> who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental should be rightly and truly f'd for that one. Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules. Delta Dental should have their ability to process credit cards completely revoked for this egregious breach.

That's a good point. The best way to not leak a secret is to not have the secret in the first place. I don't know anything of PCI rules but I would imagine there is a way to implement the feature "store this credit card information for future purchases" without storing the raw credit card information.

Re: Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

#14

> who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental should be rightly and truly f'd for that one. Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules. Delta Dental should have their ability to process credit cards completely revoked for this egregious breach.

I assume they kept these in a database, which was sent or exported in some way to use Move-IT to transfer somewhere else. The hack was at Move-IT's servers I think, which allowed people to read the contents. The question I have is was this information encrypted by DD or did they just assume Move-IT was safe? If the latter, it's pretty stupid.

Re: Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

#15

Cool, Delta Dental is one of the few dental insurance providers the VA recommends and offers plans with. Nothing says "we support veterans" like a good old fashioned sell-off of data.

The data was siphoned from Delta Dental, not sold by Delta Dental.

Re: Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

#17

> who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental should be rightly and truly f'd for that one. Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules. Delta Dental should have their ability to process credit cards completely revoked for this egregious breach.

That's a good point. The best way to not leak a secret is to not have the secret in the first place. I don't know anything of PCI rules but I would imagine there is a way to implement the feature "store this credit card information for future purchases" without storing the raw credit card information.

Yes, you ask for an authorization token for recurring payments from your payment provider if you intend to make subsequent charges from that card. Then you store that token only (and maybe last 4 digits of the card for the customer’s convenience) and use the token without any other card information to make charges.

Re: Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

#18

> who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental should be rightly and truly f'd for that one. Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules. Delta Dental should have their ability to process credit cards completely revoked for this egregious breach.

> Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules.

It's kind of silly though. They are no more "secret" than your credit card number itself or expiration date. Once you give it out once or hand your credit card to literally anyone, it's out. Now instead of acquiring N numbers, the hacker needs to acquire N+3 (or N+4) numbers.

Our payment system needs something like:

    struct {
        string credit_card_number;
        string expiration_date;
        string insecurity_code;
    };
...to complete a credit card transaction. At some point that record is in a computer or in your restaurant waiter's brain, so it's vulnerable to exfiltration, regardless of what part of that record gets redacted for long term storage.

We are living in a world with bozos in charge who can't seem to develop a secure payment system, so we as users need to simply assume that all information required to make a purchase on our behalf is public knowledge, and instead diligently check our records for inaccuracies. I don't sweat these "breaches" because I freeze my credit and review all my bank and credit card transactions daily now.

Re: Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people

#20

> who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental should be rightly and truly f'd for that one. Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules. Delta Dental should have their ability to process credit cards completely revoked for this egregious breach.

> Storing security codes at all is totally forbidden by PCI rules. It's kind of silly though. They are no more "secret" than your credit card number itself or expiration date. Once you give it out once or hand your credit card to literally anyone, it's out. Now instead of acquiring N numbers, the hacker needs to acquire N+3 (or N+4) numbers. Our payment system needs something like: struct { string credit_card_number;…

its not silly just because it can't solve all problems. It goes a long way to gas station type skimmers less valuable because you can't print a phony card from them, or the phony card you can print is limited to a subset of possible purchases. perfect-enemy-of-good yadayda.
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