Usually, when a hacker goes for a large company it’s for extortion. They steal records and say they will go public with the info if the company doesn’t fork over a bunch of money. But it takes real skill to pull it off.
Smaller sites are much easier targets and are a lot easier to crack into. They use software to hammer a site/server looking for loop holes they can use to exploit to grab a database, or cease control of the site/server.
Most store owners probably don’t know when they’ve been exploited and the credit card holders don’t realize they’ve been duped until their statement shows up or the bank calls them. There is a black market on the Internet for stolen credit cards. These are mainly credit cards and customer info which has been stolen from online stores with poor security policies. So you never can be too careful.
Working in this field and seeing how lax some programmers are about security concerns (not to mention the store owners themselves), I certainly don’t put any trust in small independent online stores. It’s always the phone or Paypal for me.
I am very thankful for the info! I am a somewhat naive person in that I am way too trusting and tend to believe what people say. I have never had a problem ordering from discounted yarn…blah dot com. except they tend to have slow shipping. I have had the same credit card for 12 years now, and only once was I called to make sure a charge was valid, I had been mugged at the age of 19 and they tried to use the card at a liquor store. Thankfully the store clerk called the card company and the muggers were unable to verify any of my info. the card company then called me to tell me that they had been alerted to the theft. In my contract with the card it says I am not liable for any purchases made that are not my own.
This also goes for car rental companies that try to sell you their extra insurance. If you have car insurance on your own car, it USUALLY covers rental cars and you don’t have to pay extra.
Just check your contracts with your credit card company and your insurance companies. Don’t pay for things you don’t need, and don’t be afraid to use the internet to buy things. Just know what you have:yay:
I JUST got done with recovering from our card being “skimmed” is what the guy at the bank called it, we had over 1600.00 taken out of our account, if it wasn’t for the fact that i have that money in our business account and not our personal , we would have been seriously hurt, i caught it the day it happened, but because of the way cc are proscessed , it took a week before everything hit the bank , and we had already canecelled the cards, so it was something else, my banker told me NEVER to buy online without a SOLID written SECURE policy on how the company stores your info.
check for padlocks and https, and if thats still not good enough for you, then set itup through a pre paid debit card type credit card, that way there is a low low limit to what can happen
oh , and BTW, the bank also said these people could have had our info for weeks or even months, just waiting to pounce on it …
thats the part that shocked me .