How safe are you online?

US authorities have indicted an international criminal gang thought to be responsible for the theft and sale of over 40 million credit and debit card numbers that were hacked from the computer systems of nine major US retailers, including TJX.

Fintech reports In what is believed to be the largest hacking and ID theft case ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice (DoJ), three US citizens, one man from Estonia, three from Ukraine, two from China and one from Belarus, as well as another individual who is only known by an online alias, have been charged with numerous counts of fraud and ID theft.

The defendants then allegedly installed “sniffer” programs that would capture card numbers, as well as password and account information, as they moved through the retailers’ credit and debit processing networks.

Once the data was collected it was concealed in encrypted computer servers that the defendants controlled in Eastern Europe and the US, says the DoJ. Some of the card numbers were sold to other criminals in the US and Eastern Europe over the Internet. The stolen numbers were “cashed out” by encoding card numbers on the magnetic strips of blank cards. The DoJ says the defendants then used these cards to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars at a time from ATMs.

In a related story BBC asks us ‘How secure is your card info?’

VeriSign, a firm that secures websites for e-commerce, told the BBC that credit and debit card information is “vulnerable” but they are working with retailers to change that.

“Credit and debit card information is just not incredibly secure,” said Perry Tancredi, VeriSign’s senior product manager for fraud detection.

“But it is counterbalanced by the amount of fraud losses due to cheque fraud and direct debit fraud which is much greater than credit card fraud.”

So not only should you worry about your credit card but also about your cheques and direct debits…..my question is …is the convenience worth the losses. One solution is to keep a separate checking account as many people do in the USA and keep your saving in a separate account (s) or bank)s.