One More Charged In TJX Breach
Written by Evan SchumanFederal prosecutors have apparently accused a New York man of providing a sniffer program to help the TJX cyberthieves steal payment data. The fact that 25-year-old Stephen Watt has been charged with unlawful access to computers, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering is not in dispute, nor is the fact that he has been accused of delivering a sniffer program to accused TJX mastermind Albert Gonzalez.
But the feds have been vague about whether Watt was involved in the TJX data heist, even though the timing of the accusations would seem to place him in the middle of the largest payment card data breach ever, according to this Computerworld story. Watt allegedly provided a sniffer program that allowed Gonzalez and other gang members to identify and capture credit and debit card data traveling over the networks they had broken into. In January, Watt edited and modified a sniffer program dubbed “blabla” that was used by the gang and stored in a server with a Latvian IP address, according to the story.
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
