LISA18

Criminals lurk on the darknet, where child abuse forums have exploded in recent years, as well as other crime: intellectual property theft, narcotics, and carding, to name a few. Roman Seleznev convicted in 2017 and now serving 27 years in Seattle, brought darknet carding data breaches to a new level. What role does the darknet play in data breaches? What can operations and infrastructure developers consider when building their systems to help prevent breaches? We review a real life darknet breach at a major retailer, who's 2017 settlement for the first time requires darknet monitoring. We demonstrate how assumptions that hackers could never reach the RAM of Point of Sale (PoS) devices facilitated some of the largest breaches in history. Credit card information stored briefly in the plain text memory buffers in the PoS systems is just one risk that may not occur in development, or may be dismissed as far-fetched. We present considerations for operations and infrastructure developers when building systems.