Charge Anywhere Hackers Were Inside For Almost 5 Years

Charge Anywhere is a provider of credit card payment services for merchants.  This week they announced that there were hackers found inside their network.

The sad thing about it is that they admitted that the bad guys had been inside their network since November 2009.  That is almost 5 years.

They said that they only found evidence of the bad guys trafficking in stolen cards between August 17, 2014 and September 24, 2014.  That doesn’t mean that these guys hadn’t been stealing data for years.

Now here is the hard part.  Unlike the Target or Home Depot breaches, a consumer has no way to know if some store that you went to used Charge Anywhere as their credit card processor.

What they say is watch your credit card and bank statements for unauthorized transactions — making their poor security hygiene your problem.  Given all the stuff going on, you should be doing this anyway, but still….

Assuming your card is misused, you are likely going to blame the merchant that you shopped with and not their credit card processor, so Charge Anywhere kind of gets a get out of jail free card.

Using cash is looking better all the time.

Mitch

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