Overview

by Ido Dubrawsky

It wasn t that difficult. Not nearly as hard as I expected. In fact, it actually was pretty easy. You just had to think about it. That s all. It seems that many security people think that by putting routers and firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDSs) in place that they have made their network secure. But that s not necessarily the case. All it takes is some small misconfiguration somewhere in their network or on a server somewhere to provide enough of a crack to let someone through

If you want to hack into someone else s network, the week between Christmas and New Year s Day is the best time. I love that time of year. No one is around, and most places are running on a skeleton crew at best. If you re good, and you do it right, you won t be noticed even by the automated systems. And that was a perfect time of year to hit these guys with their nice e-commerce site plenty of credit card numbers, I figured.

The people who ran this site had ticked me off. I bought some computer hardware from them, and they took forever to ship it to me. On top of that, when the stuff finally arrived, it was damaged. I called their support line and asked for a return or an exchange, but they said that they wouldn t take the card back because it was a closeout. Their site didn t say that the card was a closeout! I told...