PayPal privates exposed after breach on SECURITY shop

Aghast Avast: It was a reseller, not us

Antivirus firm Avast has said that it was not responsible for a breach on a website of a German reseller selling its security products that resulted in the apparent leak of the payment details of thousands of consumers over the weekend.

Turkish hacker Maxn3y defaced avadas.de on Saturday (archive here) before dumping what the hacker claimed were customer details online.

The purportedly leaked information included incomplete configuration files for the shop.avadas.de domain, what appeared to be authentic admin login details with encrypted passwords, and (most seriously), what security experts believe is the PayPal payment information for an estimated 20,000 consumers.

According to Cyberwarnews.info, which analysed the data dump, the hackers also grabbed the email addresses, user names, encrypted passwords as well as certain bank and payment details of the customers.

Procello, the German distributor that ran the site, admitted its customer database had been breached and that some of its customers info had been compromised but said it was unclear how many Avast customers were among those affected.

It played down the possibility of that the breach might result in fraud by saying that passwords were encrypted and it stored only the minimum information on its website, according to a German language statement on the front page of its website. It said the attackers had been trying to penetrate its systems for weeks before the breach, and that it had taken temporarily taken its systems offline as a precautionary measure.

Avast, the Czech security firm best known for its freebie antivirus scanner, said in a statement that the breach involved an unofficial website (run by a local reseller), that has since been suspended.

We are aware that a site appearing to be an official site, AVADAS.DE  (linked from AVAST.DE),  was hacked and compromised. However, this is not an official site and does not belong to Avast Software. Instead, it has been owned and operated for many years by Procello, a German reseller. We have demanded, and we have been refused, the return of the AVAST.DE domain name many times over the past years. We expect with this latest incident that the site will shortly be disabled and will never again be used by Procello.

Since yesterday [Monday], the reseller has shut down the AVAST.DE domain [including] its subdomains and is only using his own website.

More on the fallout from the breach can be found in an English language report by Softonic in its OnSoftware blog here. Several German language reports on the breach from the likes of Heise and others can be found here. ®