Scott Canon reports:
Snow Creek ski resort in Weston and many of its credit card customers appear to be victims of an attack by Internet hackers that first came to light Friday morning.
By midday Friday the Platte County outfit had cut its on-site credit card processing system from the Internet and was warning customers to keep close track of their bills.
Soon word was coming from credit card processing companies, banks and the Secret Service that a large number of dubious credit card transactions appeared to be linked to customers who had done business at Snow Creek.
“The Secret Service thinks we got hacked in that nanosecond before the information is encrypted,” Dave Grenier, Snow Creek’s general manager, said Monday at the end of a hectic Presidents Day weekend. “It’s still not clear what happened.”
Read more on KansasCity.com. MSNBC reports that it appears that malware was inserted in the system.
Update: Snow Creek subsequently posted a statement on their web site:
It has come to our attention that our credit card processing system has been compromised by persons not associated with our business. This compromise may have possibly affected those of you who have recently conducted business with us. As soon as we discovered the problem, we notified authorities, including the processing companies, federal agencies and local police.
We are cooperating with the United States Secret Service as that agency seeks to identify and fix this problem. In the meantime, if you have conducted a credit or debit card transaction with us this season, we advise that you take a look at your account, contact your bank and see if there are any discrepancies. If you see something unusual, you need to contact your credit card company immediately and ask for further instructions.
We are sorry that this compromise has taken place and apologize for the inconvenience it has caused you.
We have suspended our internet based credit card processing system during this investigation and have installed an analog credit card processing system in place for the customer’s convenience. On-Line (web) credit card sales were not compromised, so those of you that have shopped on the web should be ok…we just don’t know if or when we will reconnect, at this time.