Kevin Poulsen provides newly released details on the 7-Eleven hack included in Albert Gonzalez’s plea agreement:
….In his most recent plea agreement, filed in court on Monday, confessed hacker Albert Gonzalez admitted conspiring in the 7-Eleven breach, and fingered two Russian associates as the direct culprits. The Russians are identified as “Hacker 1″ and “Hacker 2″ in Gonzalez’s plea agreement, and as “Grigg” and “Annex” in an earlier document inadvertently made public by his attorney.
The Russians, evidently using an SQL injection vulnerability, “gained unauthorized access to 7-Eleven, Inc.’s servers through 7-Elevens’ public-facing internet site, and then leveraged that access into servers supporting ATM terminals located in 7-Eleven stores,” the plea agreement reads. “This access caused 7-Eleven, Inc., on or about November 9, 2007, to disable its public-facing internet site to disable the unauthorized access.”
At the time, there were 5,500 Citibank-branded ATMs at 7-Eleven stores around the country. According to SEC documents, 7-Eleven ran its own transaction processing server to handle 2,000 of them: advanced models called Vcom machines, manufactured by NCR. The 7-Eleven Vcoms support special functions like bill-payment, check cashing and money order purchases. For two weeks in September 2007, anyone who typed their PINs in one of these was exposed.
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