Fun Publications Security Update

by generalsjoes | Mar 28, 2012 | G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe Collectors Club

A little late in posting this, but the following email came through last night:

“Here is the latest update on the credit card security investigation.

The firm we have hired to analyze our former ecommerce server and software has preliminarily determined that we did incur a SQL injection code attack sometime before Christmas. Our ISP did have a commercial product installed that was supposed to defeat these types of attacks, but apparently it failed.

This allowed the hackers access to our order information. While it is still unknown exactly what data they were able to harvest (investigation continues) we need to assume that they were able to extract all of our order information. The security firm thinks that this attack has allowed the hackers to come back periodically and harvest more information. However, once the old server was taken out of service (around February 21st) there was nothing left for them to access.

Once this information was stolen, (no matter if it was back before Christmas) there is no time frame as to when the thieves may sell or try to use the information to purport credit card theft.

What does this mean to me?

We are asking again that anyone who has used a credit card in our old online systems in the past year (NOT THE NEW STORE) to get your card replaced immediately. If you have done this already, there is no action required on your part.

We apologize for the inconvenience, we know this whole thing is a pain, but it is better to replace the cards than have to deal with any issues that may result from this theft of data. Even though the amount of fraud has greatly declined, we are still receiving a customer report every few days of someone else (who hasn’t replaced their cards) getting hit. We strongly encourage you to take this step immediately if you have not done so already. Again, this DOES NOT pertain to any cards that have been used in the new store.

What is the plan?

We are still working on all of the issues and are several weeks away from a final resolution. Our new store is currently offline while we complete the entries and audit the data from the renewals we received last week. Just to reiterate, this new store is a totally different piece of software, at a totally different hosting site. There are hundreds of other retailers using this same software as it is hosted by the software creators.

We hope to have the store online and registration system back online sometime next week. When the store comes back online, we will be adding products slowly so it will take some time to have everything back in the store.

Thank you for your patience and support during this trying issue.

Brian”

Speaking as someone with an IT background and as the security officer for an agency that must comply with HIPAA security regulations, I’m pretty discouraged that it was a SQL injection account that was able to generate all of this hassle.  That’s a pretty baseline hacking tool that is fairly easily defended against, so if the fault lies with their ISP, I dearly hope Fun Publications is taking them to task over this.

The good news is, the audit is complete and hopefully things will get rolling on the new site soon.  Looking forward to moving on and getting ready for JoeCon and the FSS!