Novell chief's credit card stolen online
Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Fri, 3 Dec 1999 13:50:50 -0500 (EST)
Sally Khudairi writes:
> http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2403346,00.html
>
> Novell chief's credit card stolen online
>
> Eric Schmidt blames cookies for cyber theft -- calls cookies 'one of the
> biggest disasters for computers.'
>
> By Ben Elgin, Sm@rt Reseller
> UPDATED December 2, 1999 3:26 PM PT
>
> Novell chief Eric Schmidt knows firsthand the problem of Internet fraud.
> Speaking at San Francisco's Digital Economy conference Thursday, Schmidt
> informed the crowd that his credit card number had been stolen over the
> Internet in the past.
>
> Although he isn't sure exactly how his card number was lifted, Schmidt says
> he believes it was through a mechanism that reads the cookies-files sitting
> on a user's desktop and storing personal information, such as passwords and
> preferences.
Neat trick, considering that most sites don't store credit card info
in the cookies at all (as has been pointed out on Slashdot). It's not
completely impossible (someone could have grabbed a user ID from some
merchant site, and found a credit card number in the preferences page
displaying Schmidt's user record), but it's hardly the most likely
approach, as the Slashdot commentary on this story has pointed out.
It's also pointed out that the main reason why Schmidt's arguing
against this is because he has something that he says is better...
rst