PetCo plugs credit card leak

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/31478.html

By Kevin Poulsen, 
SecurityFocus
30/06/2003 

Pet supply retailer PetCo.com plugged a hole in its online storefront
over the weekend that left as many as 500,000 credit card numbers open
to anyone able to construct a specially-crafted URL.

The pet site was vulnerable to the same kind of SQL injection
vulnerability that lead to an FTC complaint against the fashion label
Guess, in a case that settled earlier this month.

Twenty-year old programmer Jeremiah Jacks discovered both holes. Jacks
say news media interest in the Guess case prompted him to check a few
other large e-commerce sites for similar bugs. He chose PetCo.com
because a competing e-tailer had been vulnerable last year, "so I was
wondering about other pet sites," says Jacks.

Jacks used Google to find active server pages on PetCo.com that
accepted customer input, then simply tried inputting SQL database
queries into them. "It took me less than a minute to find a page that
was vulnerable," says Jacks. "Any SQL injection hacker would be able
to do the same thing."

He says the database contained 500,000 credit card entries, and that
he could have accessed corresponding customer names and address, as
well as entire orders. "Everything was in there... It exposed their
whole database," says Jacks.

PetCo spokesman Shawn Underwood confirmed the hole, but would not say
how many credit card numbers had been at risk. He added that he was
uncertain whether customer names and other information could have been
tied to those numbers. Under a state law that takes effect Tuesday, a
online leak of credit card numbers with corresponding names triggers
mandatory notification to California customers.

"Now we're going though every page and making sure that everything is
locked down," says spokesman Shawn Underwood. "Our biggest concern is
that the problems is fixed, but we want to make sure that nobody went
in prior to him and got this information."

SecurityFocus notified PetCo of Jacks' discovery on Thursday, and the
company immediately blocked access to the vulnerable Web page. The
company issued a statement Sunday saying it closed the hole
permanently, and had hired a computer security consultant to assist in
an audit of the site. Jacks also cooperated with the company, which
has found no evidence that anyone prior to Jacks exploited the
vulnerability.

The ease with which he located another major leak of customer data
underscores the difficulty of securing e-commerce storefronts, which
often run on code that's been customized, or written from scratch,
says Jacks. "It's not something that's waiting for Microsoft to issue
a patch, or something like that."

The FTC case that settled a week and a half ago charged Guess with
deceptive trade practices. An SQL injection vulnerability on Guess.com
made some 200,000 credit card numbers accessible, despite assurances
in the company's privacy policy that such data was only stored in an
encrypted form.

PetCo's privacy policy is less specific, promising only, "At PETCO.com
our customers' data is strictly protected against any unauthorized
access."

"I'm sure we thought it was," says Underwood.



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