Argos have exposed customers credit card details and CCV security numbers?in their e-mail receipts. A customer who checked his e-mail receipt found buried in the HTML source code, was his full credit card number and security code. Meaning that if any of these e-mails were to be intercepted the credit card details could potentially be found, and somebody else’s hard earnt money spent. The customer who exposed this breach had recently had his details fraudulently misused, but this has not been linked to Argos.

Worryingly, it’s? unknown how long this exposure has been going on for, and the number of consumers affected. Argos have said the fault has already been corrected. They are currently working with the Information Commissioner’s office to deal with the breaches effects.

It seems however that the whole thing could have been easily avoided, if Argos had simply had a good content filtering product in place. This would have meant that encryption of the e-mail receipts was enforced, or that the data was blocked from being sent out at all. The basic default or standard security?rules of most content filtering packages would do this.

This incident just goes to show how important it is to filter both inbound and outbound mail. And pretty awesome (in the true sense of the word), that a company as large as Argos hasn’t enforced this basic security procedure.