Book2Park is known to offer parking slots and spaces near airports across 90 locations in USA. The service provider allows people to book offsite airport parking slots through the internet and reserve their slots much in advance. This very procedure requires the customers to enter their credit card details to make the online payment. Only after making the payment is the airport parking spot booked for them to avail on the date they are flying out. The possible data that reached the hackers through the malware included customer’s first and last names, credit card account numbers, addresses, expiration dates and the security codes of the cards.
Only a while after the cyber crime occurred, a few financial institutions noticed that a batch of credit cards numbers went up for sale on an underground site at the cost of pennies. These cards belonged to those who had recently made reservations at Book2Park. As soon as the service provider got to know about this, it took action to remove the malicious servers from the website and informed its customers about the breach. It took full responsibility for what had happened and reassured its customers that their credit card information would be secured. By doing so, not only did the service provider restore the trust of its customers but also ensured that it was fully dedicated to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
It is a fact that cards stolen from online transactions can only be used for fraudulent purposes by thieves. This however is not the case when card data is stolen from the main street retailers. But what is interesting here is the fact that such e-commerce site hacks are not unlike the breaches made on end user PCs or consumer systems. What happens is that hackers plant malicious servers or malwares on the site and this malware then records sensitive data entered by the visitors on the website. This data is then secretly copied from the transaction stream and is then encrypted. If Book2park didn’t detect the issue so soon and didn’t take require action swiftly, then several thousands of customers would be affected. The service provider has reassured all that steps are being taken to understand the loophole that allowed hackers place the malware in the servers. It is trying to strengthen its systems to avoid any such incident happening again.
