Credit Card Details Freely Available on Web
Credit card details of British shoppers have been made freely available on the internet
The data, which includes names and home addresses as well as full card information, was accessible through a simple Google search.
It is believed that the details of thousands of Visa, Mastercard and American Express customers was mistakenly put in the public domain by fraudsters, who planned to sell it on to other scammers. A spokesman for the banking industry body APACS said that most of the cards on the list had already been cancelled, but there are concerns that their owners were not made aware that they had been leaked online.
Internet security experts said it was very rare for such a complete set of credit card data to be posted on the web for anyone to access.Nigel Evans MP, chairman of the all party parliamentary group on identity fraud, told the Daily Mail: "This is hugely worrying. The credit card companies have a duty of care to inform all those involved that they are at risk of identity fraud."
A spokesman for APACS said: "The banking industry takes every data breach extremely seriously. We'd like to remind all online businesses of their responsibility to store card details securely."
The data was originally posted on an unsecured server in Vietnam used by criminal gangs. The site was closed down in Febuary but the information remained available on a "cached" version of the page on Google, which stores historical snapshots of websites even after they are removed. A Google spokesman said that the information had now been removed.
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