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jcapote

Confirmed by Gabe here: http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/121/1212201p1.html

All passwords are salted and hashed (hope they are using bcrypt), and all CC's are encrypted.

EDIT: updated comment to clarify what I meant with the bcrypt

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Whatever encryption for CCs, I think its going to have to be reversible or there wont be any point of storing them.

Unless they keep the keys somewhere unrelated?

The keys generally aren't kept anywhere. In fact, the encryption keys for a company valve's size should be split among multiple key company officials. The idea being, you should be able to steal the box that contains the credit card data and/or the machine that does the actual encryption and not have access to the keys (which, technically, aren't stored anywhere).

One technique is to store another string (a pepper) outside of the database (assuming the salt is stored with the records) which is used along with the salt to encrypt each password. This way, if only the database is compromised, and not the config file or env variable holding the pepper you're in better shape.

if they got to the database!, what makes you think they didn't get to the app server?

This could be the result of sql injection or some other application-level attack.

Or possibly just a lost backup tape.

If some backup tapes might go out of the building, they'd better be encrypted...

I certainly DO hope that some backup tapes go out of the building. Offsite backups are a good thing.

Although they theoretically could have, a lot of these hacks are done via SQL Injection, which is a step below having direct access to the machines. You can often leverage SQL injection further to do just that, but it takes more work/luck/skill than just dumping the DB. So it's not a given that they got filesystem access, but we shouldn't assume that they didn't either.

The fact that one of the points of having a three-tiered architecture is improved security?

I could be missing something obvious here, but bcrypt, although mentioning the word "crypt" and using cryptography, is only a hashing algorithm. [1]

I believe the point of storing CC data would be to retrieve it (impossible, typically, by the nature of hashing) to enable the user to purchase goods using this information stored without having to fetch their CC details.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt

Edit: Ah. I seem to have correlated your note with the latter part of your sentence.

Hashing algorithms don't necessarily need to be irreversible.

A cryptographic hash attempts to be as hard to reverse as possible (amongst other things).

So bcrypt has to do with cryptography, a bit.

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