There are no details about the data theft method at the moment, but given the statement said the BA website and BA mobile app was compromised, I think we could be looking at another example of an insecure API being exploited, as per the Air Canada breach and the T-Mobile breach last month.
We'll see what comes out in the wash over the next few days and weeks, but thanks to the GDPR, at least UK firms are quickly notifying their customers when their personal and financial data has been compromised, even if there is little detail reported about how. Without knowing how the data was compromised, customers cannot be truly assured their private data is safe. It also will be interesting to learn whether the BA systems were compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), required by all organisations that accept, process, store and/or transmit debit and credit cards.
Update:
A spokesperson at BA said "hackers carried out a sophisticated, malicious criminal attack on its website" and impacted BA customers would be compensated.
380,000 card payment transactions were confirmed as stolen, specifically:
Update:
A spokesperson at BA said "hackers carried out a sophisticated, malicious criminal attack on its website" and impacted BA customers would be compensated.
380,000 card payment transactions were confirmed as stolen, specifically:
- Full Name
- Email address
- Payment card number (PAN)
- Expiration date
- Card Security Code [CVV] - typically a 3 digit authorisation code written on the back of the debit\credit card
BA insists it did not store the CVV numbers, these are not allowed to be stored after payment card authorisation under PCI DSS. This suggests the card details may have been intercepted during the payment transaction, perhaps by a maliciously injected or compromised third party website plugin, as opposed to data theft from the database, as often seen with SQL injections attacks against web apps.
BA have published help and FAQs to anyone that is impacted by this data breach.
https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/incident/data-theft/latest-information
British Airways is owned by IAG, their share price dropped by more than 4%, which equates to a £500m+ value loss in the company.
Update on the Attack Method (11 Sept 2018)
In a blog post RiskIQ researchers have claimed to have found evidence that a web-based card skimmer script was injected into the BA website, very similar to the approach used by the Magecard group, who are believed to be behind a similar attack against the Ticketmaster website recently. Web-based card skimmer script attacks have been occurring since 2015.
In this case, once the customer entered their payment card details and submitted the payment either on a PC or on a touchscreen device, the malicious script captured their data and sent it to a virtual (VPS) server hosted in Romania. The server was hosted on a domain called baways.com and was certified (https) by Comodo to make it look legit. The server domain was registered 6 days before the breach started, this obviously went undetected by BA's security, perhaps the rogue domain registration could have been picked up by a threat intelligence service.
Researchers have also claimed the BA website wasn't PCI DSS. They found 7 scripts running on the BA website, but crucially said the BA payment page wasn't isolating the card payments within an iframe, which would prevent third-party scripts (and XSS attacks) from being able to read the payment card form fields.
Bill Conner, CEO SonicWall said "Organizations and government entities carry a responsibility to consumers and civilians alike to guard their most valuable information at all cost. While the British Airways breach may not have been as detrimental as I’m sure its culprits would have liked it to be, it should serve as a wake-up call to CTOs, CIOs and CISOs. The fact is, it is early days, and the true damage done is yet to be seen. Personal information that does not change as easily as a credit card or bank account number drive a high price on the Dark Web. This kind of Personally Identifiable Information is highly sought after by cybercriminals for monetary gain. Companies should be implementing security best practices such as a layered approach to protection, as well as proactively updating any out of date security devices, as a matter of course."
British Airways is owned by IAG, their share price dropped by more than 4%, which equates to a £500m+ value loss in the company.
Update on the Attack Method (11 Sept 2018)
In a blog post RiskIQ researchers have claimed to have found evidence that a web-based card skimmer script was injected into the BA website, very similar to the approach used by the Magecard group, who are believed to be behind a similar attack against the Ticketmaster website recently. Web-based card skimmer script attacks have been occurring since 2015.
In this case, once the customer entered their payment card details and submitted the payment either on a PC or on a touchscreen device, the malicious script captured their data and sent it to a virtual (VPS) server hosted in Romania. The server was hosted on a domain called baways.com and was certified (https) by Comodo to make it look legit. The server domain was registered 6 days before the breach started, this obviously went undetected by BA's security, perhaps the rogue domain registration could have been picked up by a threat intelligence service.
Researchers have also claimed the BA website wasn't PCI DSS. They found 7 scripts running on the BA website, but crucially said the BA payment page wasn't isolating the card payments within an iframe, which would prevent third-party scripts (and XSS attacks) from being able to read the payment card form fields.
Bill Conner, CEO SonicWall said "Organizations and government entities carry a responsibility to consumers and civilians alike to guard their most valuable information at all cost. While the British Airways breach may not have been as detrimental as I’m sure its culprits would have liked it to be, it should serve as a wake-up call to CTOs, CIOs and CISOs. The fact is, it is early days, and the true damage done is yet to be seen. Personal information that does not change as easily as a credit card or bank account number drive a high price on the Dark Web. This kind of Personally Identifiable Information is highly sought after by cybercriminals for monetary gain. Companies should be implementing security best practices such as a layered approach to protection, as well as proactively updating any out of date security devices, as a matter of course."
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