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Health & Fitness

Cyberhack at Target!

I shopped at the Highland Park Target and my card number was apparently caught up in the nationwide hacking attack we've heard about recently...

By now I'm sure that many of you have heard of the nationwide cyber attack on the credit card swipe terminals at Target stores.  I just wanted to relate that our own Highland Park Target store has apparently been hacked as well - my wife and I shopped there during the time frame that the hack was to have taken place, so I was reviewing my credit statement this morning when a charge that I didn't recognize caught my attention.

Transaction date 12/13, Post date 12/15 Description: CEWCS.com  Amount $9.84

As a technology consultant I visit a lot of websites, but neither my wife nor I recalled visiting this one.  So I checked out their website, and while it purports to be a "Support Center", probably to give people with doubts about the veracity of the charge the idea that it was for a support call, I checked the records for the website's domain name:

Created 1/15/2013, Updated 11/21/2013, Expires 1/15/2015.  Private registration.

The host has an IP of 98.129.229.67, which appears to be hosted by Rackspace.

I suspect that this site was set up as a way to test stolen credit card information - throw a small, inconspicuous charge against a number and see if anyone charges it back - if not, charge more.

So gentle reader, if you've shopped at our local Target store, examine your credit card statements for November and December and if you don't recognize anything - dispute it.  And also ask them to cancel the card number and issue you a new one.

Be careful out there - Cyberspace can be a rough neighborhood at times.

Updates:  Report this criminal activity to the domain registrar and their hosting provider.

The domain is registered at DirectNIC and their email address is:

abuse@directnic.com

The website itself is hosted on RackSpace cloud servers (a.k.a. Stable Transit), and the email address to report this to is:

support@clickandname.com

Tell RackSpace that the IP address is: 98.129.229.67


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