14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, a hacker known as Reckz0r claimed to have hacked MasterCard and Visa. He later changed his story to say that he actually obtained tens of gigabytes of payment information from a number of 79 banks that he had been “targeting” for three months.
However, according to LA Times, MasterCard has denied being hacked. The company has also highlighted the fact that the data leak doesn’t actually contain any payment information, as the hacker claimed.
Furthermore, IDG’s Jeremy Kirk has attempted to contact a number of the affected individuals and has learned that much of the information is seven years out of date.
As we have reported earlier, the information published by Reckz0r was found on an Arab forum, where it had been posted more than one week before by a group of hackers calling themselves Group 404 Hack. They claimed to have obtained the details from an Israeli data center.
On the other hand, one of our readers has pointed out that much of the hacker’s work may not be genuine.
A post on the Script Kiddies Exposed blog shows that Reckz0r might have taken large amounts of source code from other websites.
Moreover, while the hacker has denied being Pakistani, a screenshot of an older website defacement shows that at the time he proudly announced that he was a “Pakistani Hacker.”
His latest data leak, posted on July 19, also shows up on another website where it’s claimed by a collective called Zero for Owned.
We haven’t been able to determine the date of the data dump published by Zero for Owned, but it seems to be older than the one posted by Reckz0r because it shows up on a number of different websites.