Betfair Stolen Data

They will get around to telling the forum later I'm sure;

Betfair is in for a rough ride over data theft
The short paragraph in the 244-page flotation prospectus looked anodyne enough.

Grey Abbey, ridden by jockey Gary Lee, jumps the last fence on his way to win the Betfair Bowl Steeple Chase Photo: Reuters
By Alistair Osborne6:00AM BST 30 Sep 20116 Comments
Among 13 pages of risk factors was the generic heading: "Failure to adequately protect customer account information could have a material adverse effect on Betfair."
In one sentence the betting exchange, then shooting for a £1.39bn valuation, admitted it had "experienced a limited number of security breaches in the past [which have not had a significant effect on Betfair's reputation, operations, financial performance and prospects and in respect of which remedial action has been taken]".
No great drama there, then. Indeed, any potential investor weighing up last October's £13-a-share float was much more likely to have focused on the prominent description of Betfair's "unique" exchange technology, supporting more than 3m registered customers.
It "processed, on average, more than 5m transactions per day... more than on all European stock exchanges combined", page two of the prospectus trumpeted – a claim frequently echoed by David Yu, the man who graduated from chief technology officer to chief executive.
Nowhere did the prospectus – punted to investors by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital and Numis Securities – detail what had really been going on lately with Betfair's renowned technology.

Namely, that a bunch of cyber-criminals, possibly originating in Cambodia, had breached the company's security systems on March 14, 2010. They had subsequently stolen, among other things, 2.28m "encrypted payment card account numbers and details", 3.16m "account user names with encrypted security questions" and 89,744 "account usernames with bank account details".
Indeed, a progress report marked "Betfair Critical Confidential" tells how "the attacker did indeed manage to copy the entire Sportex database" – the one that contains all cardholder details. The report is dated September 27, 2010. That's just six days after the company announced its "intention to list" – a statement containing Yu's explanation of how "Betfair's unique and highly sophisticated exchange platform technology is at the very heart of the company's success".
Such a confident statement is itself surprising. Just a month before the decision to press ahead with the float, Betfair had received a "Forensic Investigation Report" on the cyber theft from security consultancy Information Risk Management (IRM).
Its first conclusion was that: "Appropriate information security governance is not in place within Betfair and as a consequence the business has been exposed to significant risks."
Another one? That "appropriate technical controls relating to such elements as network segregation and file integrity monitoring that would provide Betfair the ability to deter, prevent and detect such an incident are not in place".
Neither did the prospectus detail the criminal and regulatory brouhaha unleashed by Betfair's belated discovery that, in the words of the "Project Brazil Progress Report, "a large volume of data" had been stolen.
The first Betfair knew of the theft was when a "production log server" crashed in its Malta data centre on May 20 – more than two months after the initial breach. That led to the discovery that "at least nine servers [had] been compromised in the UK and two in Malta".
The data was extracted, it turned out, "beyond Betfair's information systems perimeter via compromised hosts located within public internet service providers", themselves located in Belgium and Germany.
The theft was so serious that Betfair was forced to inform the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), the Australian Federal Police and German law enforcement officials. It also notified the UK Gambling Commission and the Maltese Lotteries and Gaming Authority, as well as Royal Bank of Scotland, its "acquiring bank" – the lender responsible for accepting credit and debit card payments made via Betfair.
An "Incident Report to Regulators", dated July 15, 2010, explains that the thieves' haul included "approximately 850,000 unexpired credit card details" – a large number in relation to the company's current 949,000 "active users", or regular gamblers.
"We have taken the prudent view that the criminal has the expertise to decrypt the payment card details," Betfair admitted, though stressed that the "CVV2/CVC security numbers" were not stolen.
It said advice from RBS was that "this very significantly limits the ability of the cards to be used fraudulently".
On Thursday, in its first comments on the affair, Betfair insisted that the data were "unusable for fraudulent activity" and "there was no risk to customers".
Its July report to regulators states it had decided there was no reason to inform its customers, after taking advice from SOCA that "public disclosure would be detrimental to any intelligence operation or investigation".
It would have also been detrimental to its float. Betfair was, after all, listed on a racy earnings multiple thanks to some clever marketing that repositioned a business reliant on gamblers as a wizzy technology stock.
Investors have since lost 43pc of their money. They might now wish, notwithstanding Betfair's insistence that "remedial action" had been taken, that they had heard how consultants IMR pithily summed up Betfair's technology: "The IT infrastructure has not been designed, built or maintained to best practices."

I don't know what the heck happend to Betfair lately. When it first started up until around 2004-05 it was a friendly enviroment person to person laying and then that all went out the window.Then it became person against Betfair and then Roulette and poker and all that came in now anyone joining will never know what a beautiful concept Betfair was. They need 10 O-levls to work their way around now wheras from 2000-05 you didnt even need to have went to school(as some posters pre 2005 proves)....Sad i know every one has to move on with the times but Betfair went that fas they have tried to overtake the present

Analogs,they have over complicated the whole concept and the site in general,was there really any need for the roulette ,poker etc ?  Just greed innit really.

bf's standards seem to have dropped so low

Happy,thanks,but that was copy and pasted from here ,telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsby

Meanwhile the Eating Commission issued this statement


"BURP"

Made one post on #Betfair as Pittsburgh Phil. Commented on the Data Breach. What they do next? DELETED my account.

Shocking way to treat Pittsburgh Phil imo.  The Stasi had nothing on BF and were probably a more honest organization if the truth be told!

this is such a good fred, i love it!

just clarifying Happy[;)]

Their PR dept must be busy again , following on from all the coverage of the Jackpot story .

Can't think why the share price isn't rocketing , it is being so well run.