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Hannaford Grocery Breached With Malware
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-04-02
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The introduction of malware into the grocery chain's network allowed outsiders to grab credit card information as it traveled from the point-of-sale to the company's back end systems.
 | | Hannaford Grocery Breached With Malware |  |
One piece of malware on one machine leaped to 300 other servers, leaving credit card-using grocery customers up and down Hannaford's operations vulnerable to the theft of their credit card numbers. Rather than some kind of actively cracked breach, Hannaford suffered at the hands of a passive attack.
The Christian Science Monitor said malware made it onto Hannaford's network, spreading out to permit its backers to find a weak spot and grab credit cards. As a federal investigation into the problem that has yielded a couple of thousand cases of fraud is ongoing, more details won't be available for some time.
We can speculate on how it happened, and probably won't be far off the mark. For malware to do what has been suggested, it seems likely it landed on a machine where a user with elevated privileges was logged in.
A normal user wouldn't (we hope) be able to touch a few hundred servers with enough rights to dump malware onto them. SC Magazine cited one security pro as guessing the attackers broke into the Hannaford network, scanned for vulnerable points, and delivered the malware to other machines that way.
That first break-in still makes us think someone managed to get a malicious payload onto an admin-privileged box for starters. With so many Iframe exploits hitting websites in recent weeks, all it would take is one visit to a server that could connect to a download via JavaScript and bring in additional programs.
If a case ever gets made against the criminals responsible for the software, something we suspect won't happen, we could learn how they accomplished the Hannaford attack. But we're inclined to believe the hackers exist outside the country and away from any effective legal penalties.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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