, SecurityFocus 2004-11-17
Pet supply retailer Petco Animal Supplies Inc. will be on a short cybersecurity leash for the next 20 years to settle a Federal Trade Commission action over a security hole on it's e-commerce site that may have left as many as 500,000 customer credit card numbers exposed to hackers.
SecurityFocus notified Petco of Jacks' discovery, and the company immediately blocked access to the vulnerable Web page. The company worked over a weekend to close the hole, and said it had hired a computer security consultant to assist in an audit of the site. Jacks also cooperated with Petco, which said at the time that it found no evidence that anyone previously exploited the hole, which, according to the FTC, had been present since the site's launch in February 2001.
The episode prompted an FTC investigation into alleged deceptive trade practices by Petco, based on the company's privacy policy, which was sprinkled with such reassurances as: "At PETCO.com, protecting your information is our number one priority, and your personal information is strictly shielded from unauthorized access." Under the terms of the
"Petco is committed to keeping all customer information obtained through our website and stores private and secure, and we have taken -- and will continue to take -- necessary measures to achieve that goal," the company said in a statement Wednesday. "The agreement we've entered into with the Federal Trade Commission is neither an admission of any violation of law nor that facts in the FTC draft complaint are true."
Programmer's Second Case
The Petco probe is the FTC's fifth cybersecurity case, and the second for which Jacks can take credit. In February 2002
Jacks found Petco vulnerable after a print journalist reporting on the Guess settlement asked him how prevalent SQL injection holes were on the Internet, prompting the young coder to check a few other large e-commerce sites for similar bugs, he says. He says the accessible Petco database contained 500,000 credit card entries. Neither Petco nor the FTC have commented on the number of cards that were at risk.
Jacks, now 22, lives in Orange County, California, working on programming projects for area Internet firms and learning the ropes of e-commerce. "Eventually, I do want to fall into security, but I want to be well-rounded," he says. He believes SQL injection vulnerabilities remain widespread, but says he isn't interested in sparking any more federal investigations into Fortune 500 companies. "I don't want to have any legal trouble. I don't need that in my life right now."
Perhaps wary of appearing aligned with hackers, the FTC has not acknowledged Jacks' role in building the commission's cyber security caseload.
The FTC stepped into the business cyber security arena in 2002, when it won a consent decree against Eli Lilly for the inadvertent disclosure of the e-mail addresses of 669 Prozac users. Since then it's won settlements from Microsoft, Guess, and
FTC attorney Alan Sheer says the commission has no way to gauge if the cases are making a difference. "Certainly we hope that firms are paying attention to the actions that we're taking and are making appropriate changes to their practices."
