I was reading Brian Krebs – KrebsOnSecurity blog. In his latest post he wrote about ChronoPay Co-founders arrest.
I haven’t used ChronoPay and I’m not sure how it works. I tried to log into their site, but the website is down for some reason, may be co-founder Pavel Vrublevsky’s arrest is one of the reason. Using Google’s cache feature, I managed to look into the site. Most of it’s features are close to what www.Paypal.com offers.
Krebs, in the blog post mentioned:
… ChronoPay, the country’s largest processor of online payments, for allegedly hiring a hacker to attack his company’s rivals…
and
…hired by Vrublevsky to launch a debilitating cyber attack against Assist, a top ChronoPay competitor. According to Russian news organizations, the ChronoPay executive wanted to sideline rival payment processing firms who were competing for a lucrative contract to process payments for Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline…
However, he did not mention who the targeted Competitor was.
A quick look at ChronoPay’s features and their line of business, you’ll notice that they are very similar to Paypal. Now my guess is, the competitor Krebs is referring to, who was at the receiving end is – PayPal.
This leaves us wondering if Paypal’s security is at risk. By all measures, Paypal is the leader when it comes to online payments / merchant accounts, most freelancers, online merchants have an account with Paypal, and it is accepted worldwide. If such a site is targeted, a lot of peoples money can be at stake.
Keeping the speculations away from bay, let’s wait and see if we can get more details about the Targeted Company !
If you know anything about who was targeted please do share via comments.