Hackers steal Co-op patrons' personal information

Falling victim to digital maliciousness, HuskyDirect.com was hacked early last week, leaving credit card numbers and other customer information up for the hacker's grabs.

HuskyDirect.com is an official vendor of UConn sports goods that works in cooperation with the UConn Co-op. The site has been taken down, citing on its homepage that it is "undergoing crucial maintenance." The page is not expected to be operational until Co-op officials have confidence the vendor has fixed any problems that left the site vulnerable in the first place. According to the HuskyDirect homepage, it will be at least "a few days" before confidence is restored and the site is resurrected.

While it has been reported that only those who have made purchases through HuskyDirect were affected (Co-op customers need not worry unless they purchased goods from Huskydirect.com) the tally of victims is not slight. UConn informed 18,000 online shoppers of the breach, and suggested they make efforts to protect their information and, subsequently, themselves.

"To help guard against any fraudulent use of your personal information, we are offering you credit monitoring services," an email issued to all HuskyDirect customers read. "If you detect any suspicious activity on your account, you should promptly notify the institution with which the account is maintained and also contact your local law enforcement."

Apart from offering and suggesting formal credit surveillance, the email urged that potential victims stay vigilant. It warned that even if there is no suspicious activity now, hackers sometimes hold credit card and personal information to use at a later time. Customers shouldn't take the incident lightly.

"You also should strongly consider obtaining a replacement credit card," the email read.

The official warning letter offered only one vague sentence explaining how this unsettling incident occurred.

"The hacker inserted a program onto our vendors servers that appears to have accessed information from our customer database."

There hasn't been much public explanation since.

Reactions by ex-customers turned current victims on a UConn basketball blog suggest that damage was minimal, but noticeable. The hackers' first steps seem to be baby steps before attempting to make larger, more financially damaging leaps into and out of the victims bank accounts.

"Our bank called us last Monday, saying there were two suspicious charges on my ATM card, both in England, small amounts but there may be more in transit," one blogger wrote.

Another shared a similar experience.

"We just had to cancel our bank cards because of four fraudulent attempts to get money from us, and were wondering why. Now we know. One vendor got $4.95, but we had that reversed. Another was a far-right religious organization, another was Disney Movie Channel and another was the Real.com people, the folks who offer Real Player."

Though small transactions were the general trend, some customers have reported multiple charges of over a hundred dollars – one of them reporting two charges of over a thousand dollars.

The precautionary email sent to potential victims by the UConn Co-op closed by saying, "We take pride in protecting the personal information of our customers."