BPWCCUL averts massive breach by international hackers

Quick action by fraud officials with the island’s largest credit union has averted what could have been a major breach of the more than 100 000 membership card accounts.

Group Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Public Workers Cooperative Credit Union Limited (BPWCCUL) Glyne Harrison revealed on Tuesday that it was discovered that international hackers were attempting to breach the card accounts, but were blocked.

However, a notice to members disclosed that the “potential security breach…has affected a limited number of BPWCCUL debit Mastercard holders”.

Explaining the hack attempt, Harrison told Barbados TODAY: “You have these international hackers that try to penetrate and get into your card…not the card system, but try to guess what the legitimate card number is and then use that legitimate card number to do transactions.

“But we had our fraud detection system, through our provider, that was able to detect the transactions that were being attempted and blocked the bin on which they were coming. So, these were acquired overseas on the Internet. Some notorious players were trying to get our card numbers to try to get legitimate transactions but we were able to block them.”

Harrison said the hackers attempted to make small transactions, not large ones.

“We would have had some probes to see if there were legitimate card numbers…so we would have sent out a notice to all of our members to say, ‘check your statement to make sure that everything is good. Proactively, we are letting you know that we had some suspicious activity with people trying to get into our cards, so, check and make sure you are not seeing any type of nefarious activity’. So, it was more of a proactive measure than the fact that we had this big issue,” the group CEO assured.

In its notice to members, the credit union acknowledged the concern the incident may cause and assured that it was “committed to resolving the situation”.

“In response to this potential breach, we are in the process of issuing and replacing compromised cards to affected members. If your card has been identified as compromised, you will receive a replacement card in the mail shortly,” the BPWCCUL advised customers. “The security and protection of your account is paramount to us and we assure you that we are working with our service provider to preempt breaches of this nature.”

The organisation informed members that in an effort to protect their cards, the service provider may block them if suspicious transactions are suspected on their accounts. Members were also urged to contact the credit union immediately if they suspected their accounts might be blocked.

Harrison pointed out that it was not unusual for hackers to attempt to breach accounts, and he offered advice to customers to keep on top of transactions.

“You should be checking your statements carefully every month, especially people who do online shopping. You don’t know where your card number is being stored. Sometimes you put a number and they could subscribe to a magazine and then it is captured…and there are always things going on. So, one of the big messages we put out there is ‘check your statements consistently every month’,” he said.

Harrison also recommended that customers put alerts on their accounts so they can see debits and ensure they are legitimate.

“We are telling people, ‘put alerts on your systems to be aware when withdrawals are coming off, and check and make sure that is a legitimate withdrawal,” he advised.

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb