Samsung Reassures Mobile Payments Data Are Safe After LoopPay Hack; ‘Samsung Pay Not Affected By The LoopPay Hack,’ Says Electronics Company
Samsung Electronics denied on Oct. 8 that its mobile payment system, Samsung Pay, was impacted after unknown hackers reportedly supported by the Chinese government tried to steal the information of Samsung Pay users stored in technology created by LoopPay.
"The first thing to know is that Samsung Pay was not impacted by the LoopPay hack and at no point was any personal payment information at risk," Samsung Electronics wrote on its official blog, as noted by Korea Herald on the same day.
Reports revealed that Samsung acquired LoopPay in February. After a month, hackers allegedly known as Codoso Group or Sunshock Group had breached LoopPay's system.
Samsung chief privacy officer Darlene Cedres said the incident had nothing to do with Samsung Pay.
"This was an isolated incident that targeted the LoopPay corporate network, which is a physically separate network," said Cedres, as reported by The New York Times on Oct. 7. "The LoopPay corporate network issue was resolved immediately and had nothing to do with Samsung Pay."
"It's worth reiterating that the reported incident was related to LoopPay's office network which handles email, file servers and printing within the company. This network is physically separate from the production network that handles payment transactions and run by Samsung."
According to LoopPay executives, the alleged Chinese hackers seemed to be after a major part of Samsung Pay which is the Magnetic Secure Transmission or MST. The technology is considered as the "backbone of Samsung Pay."
LoopPay chief executive and co-general of Samsung Pay Will Graylin reassures that the hackers were not able to access the information of the customers.
Meanwhile, a director of enterprise data security said "no one is free from breach risk."
"If you store, process and collect sensitive data, especially payments and personal data, your business is on the radar of attackers, period," said Mark Bower of HP Data Security, as reported by Inquirer.net on Oct. 8.
"Forensics are a powerful tool to discover the extent of a breach, but by then the data is long gone. Any company today has to assume a breach will happen and take more advanced threat mitigation measures."
