Proposal for Multimedia Project Essay

A self-declared grey hat hacker has leaked credit card information from Visa and MasterCard. In a Pastebin statement, ‘Reckz0r’ said that he targeted the credit card giants for ‘curiosity and challenge’ and was only leaking a portion of the credit card information as he could not leak everything, as it was ‘too large’. He said: â€Å"I’m also censoring the credit card information such as CC number, secret code, expiry date for security measures, I also edited the way the information will look, the original one looked bullshit. The document includes the card owner’s name, address, telephone number and email address. Speaking on Twitter Reckz0r said that he did not hack Visa and MasterCard, but several banks. He later tweeted that he had ‘penetrated over 79 large banks’ and had been targeting these banks for three months. In a web chat, Reckz0r told SC Magazine that the total data file was 50GB and it mainly consisted of credit card data and ‘contained data of company-owners, for example (LinkedIn co-founder) Reid Hoffman’. He declined to answer a question on how he hacked the two companies, but when asked if he found flaws to make this hack easier, he said yes and admitted that he had also hacked into the FBI, Pentagon and US Navy websites and ‘leaked some of their staff emails’. In this instance, Reckz0r chose to reveal personal details of customers. Asked why he chose not to hit the credit card companies directly, Reckz0r said: â€Å"I’ve took down mastercard. com a year ago and Visa. This time, I did a leak. I hacked a few banks and leaked the information. The full leak is 50GB containing 500,000 citizen’s information. He confirmed that he was involved in the attack on MasterCard and Visa in December 2010, when Anonymous declared support for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after PayPal permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks. This led to attacks on PayPal and other sites who chose not to support Assange or the whistle-blowing website. Reckz0r said that he was involved in the Visa and MasterCard attacks with two others. He said: â€Å"We’re just showing that when LulzSec was over, people thought it’s the end of Anonymous, it isn’t actually. † He also said that he was working alone as he had been before. Tal Be’ery, web research team leader at Imperva, said: â€Å"Having looked at the files that were posted, it doesn’t look credible. If anything he hacked a website and downloaded credit card details that contained Visa and MasterCard – along with American Express. But it is highly unlikely that he hacked both Visa and MasterCard directly. † Asked what he would say to people suggesting it is not genuine credit card data, Reckz0r said: â€Å"They’re a bunch of haters, if I wouldn’t censor the data and leak the whole 50GB data, I’d be noticed as a black hat. †