A story of a florist, death and 292 credit card numbers
Have you ever searched on the internet for your own credit card number? (Better – search for only for the first or last 8 digits or so. You don’t want to put your whole card number into Google’s search cache).
David Heath did – he is an internet security consultant. What he came up with was a list of 292 orders, complete with credit card numbers, expiry dates, email addresses and other identifying information published on a web site owned by a person or company which he hasn’t been able to identify and as the hosting company for the site is also unknown, the web site is still online. But where the numbers come from was easy to identify – a florist’s web site in another country.
The story of what happened after he contacted them is reported here, and makes interesting reading – also for non-techie users of the web.
Update (2004-09-10):
David Heath, the author of the original article that we linked to, let us know today that the web site with the credit card numbers has now been taken down.