Turkish police make TJX arrest

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Turkish police have arrested a man for allegedly trying to sell customer data stolen from US retailer, TJX.

Authorities said the 24-year-old man, Maksym Yastremsky from the Ukraine, was recently tracked to and arrested in a Turkish nightclub for using information gained from the massive hack of the retailer's systems last year.

It is thought - according to reports from a source in the US Postal Inspection Service - he had access to a large amount of the stolen data, but that his role in the criminal network was to distribute and sell customer information on the black market as a reseller, not directly linked to the criminal gangs who instigated the theft of over 45 million customer records - the largest such theft of data to date.

It is likely US authorities will want to extradite Yastremsky if the charges are proven.

The attacks, which took place from the second half of 2005 and throughout 2006, were only discovered earlier this year, prompting the company to issue an apology and warning to its customers around the world including those who had used their credit cards to shop at TJX subsidiary, TK Maxx in the UK.

The costs of the breach continue to mount for TJX, as its banks have sued the retailer for the cost of covering fraudulent transactions, replacing compromised cards and establishing new account details.

Some estimates put the total cost of the breach in the region of $1 billion (£502.5 million), but this week TJX revised its own initial estimates of the total financial costs to the company, up from $12 million (£6.03 million) per quarter to around $118 million (£59.31 million) in total.

It is thought the attacks occurred while the retailer was using wired equivalent privacy (WEP) encryption measures to secure the wireless large area network (LAN) at one of its US stores, which was being used to transmit point-of-sale data. The hackers broke in and collected authorisation usernames and passwords to the company's central databases to gain access to sensitive customer data.

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