Network Solutions discovered malicious code which somehow found it’s way onto the servers hosting many of their e-commerce clients. According to The Tech Herald, the malicious code has been discovered on at least 4343 websites hosted with Network Solutions. These kind of things can happen to any company and it’s good to see Network Solutions doing what it can to help it’s customers. Network Solutions will be sending notices to affected clients by both email and snail mail. 

As bad as this may already sound, the real bad news is for customers of these websites hosted Network Solutions — it’s believed that transaction data on up to 573,928 credit cardholders may have been obtained from purchases made at compromised websites between March 12, 2009 and June 8, 2009. If you’ve made any only purchases within that time-frame, it may be a good idea to do a do a whois lookup to see where the websites you made purchases from are hosted. If they’re hosted with Network Solutions, make sure you check your credit card statements for unauthorized transactions. It’s also worth mentioning that not all Network Solutions e-commerce websites were affected.

This kind of stuff unfortunately happens all too often, Network Solutions being the latest victim of it. If you make a lot of online transactions, it may be worth getting a separate credit card strictly for online transactions — this will make it much easier to spot fraudulent transactions and minimize the damage that can be done from any undetected ones (so long as you set a low credit limit). Virtual credit cards are something else to look into — I’ll get a post up later today discussing what virtual credit cards are and their advantages over regular credit cards for online purchases. 

Related posts:

1. Virtual Credit Cards
2. EscrowDNS
3. PayPal Chargebacks