Piracy of bank cards on French websites

Several French electronic commerce sites were the target of computer attacks in early January 2019.

The pirates perpetrated their attacks through the Adverline advertising agency. Four days were needed to disinfect the affected sites. The damage caused is still difficult to determine.

According to the developer of the Trend Micro security software, 277 sites would be concerned. The latter states that he has blocked 11 000 times the malicious code during the first week of 2019. Figures minimized by Adverline which recognizes the attacks of 8 sites and the theft of 114 credit card numbers only.

The pirates have used a diverted technique to commit the theft. They first pirated the Adverline agency to embed in its advertisements a software capable of retrieving the numbers of the users' bank cards.

Since its appearance in 2014, this hacking technique named "Magecart" has been used against 6 000 sites according to the cyber security specialist Flashpoint.