The Wal-Mart intrusion began unraveling on Nov. 5, 2006, when the company’s IT security group was brought in to investigate the server crash.
Wal-Mart has thousands of servers nationwide, and any one of them crashing would ordinarily be a routine event. But this one raised a red flag. Someone had installed L0phtcrack, a password-cracking tool, onto the system, which crashed the server when the intruder tried to launch the program.
Investigators found that the tool had been installed remotely by someone using a generic network administrator account. The intruder had reached the machine through a VPN account assigned to a former Wal-Mart worker in Canada, which administrators had failed to close after the worker left the company. The day the server crashed, the intruder had been connected to Wal-Mart’s network for about seven hours, originating from an IP address in Minsk, the documents show.
The security team disabled the compromised VPN account, but the intruder, who should have realized the jig was up, came back in through another account belonging to a different Canadian employee. When that VPN account was closed, the intruder grabbed yet a third account while Wal-Mart workers were still scrambling to get a fix on the scope of the breach.
When Wal-Mart reviewed its VPN logs, it found that the activity had begun at least as early as June 2005, according to memos written by Wal-Mart employees during the initial stage of the investigation. The company’s server logs recorded only unsuccessful log-in attempts, not successful ones, frustrating a detailed analysis.
Wired is also reporting that Wal-Mart had 4 years worth of unencrypted customer and credit card data at the time, but it was not breached. So they did not have to disclose it until now.
Wal-Mart had a number of security vulnerabilities at the time of the attack, according to internal security assessments seen by Wired.com, and acknowledged as genuine by Wal-Mart. For example, at least four years’ worth of customer purchasing data, including names, card numbers and expiration dates, were housed on company networks in unencrypted form. Wal-Mart says it was in the process of dramatically improving the security of its transaction data, and in 2006 began encrypting the credit card numbers and other customer information, and making other important security changes.
Wal-Mart's external IT/PCI auditor, CyberTrust, found some astonishing breach of common-sense security (this blog abhors the term "Security Best Practices"):
The assessment lasted six days, during which CyberTrust found numerous problems. Each of the five stores, for example, housed complete backup copies of transaction logs on network-connected UNIX servers, which included at least four years’ worth of unencrypted credit card numbers, cardholder names and expiration dates from purchases at the stores.
The auditors also discovered that servers, transaction processing systems, and other network-connected devices handling sensitive information used the same usernames and passwords across every Wal-Mart store nationwide. In some cases, the passwords could be easily guessed. A hacker or malicious insider who compromised a point-of-sale controller or in-store card processor at one store, could “access the same device at every Wal-Mart store nationwide,” CyberTrust wrote.
And ofcourse, the intrusion could be traced back to the VPN account of a system administrator who had left the company but his account was not shut down (the report does not implicate the employee)
Wal-Mart now claims that they have identified every single finding and are now PCI compliant. Fat lot of good being PCI-compliant did Hannaford.
These companies either forget, or do not understand (we suspect over strenuous objection of their security people) that being PCI complaint is only the lowest common denominator--they can, and should, do much more.
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