A Christmas Day attack on a large Russian payment processor over there can indicate trouble on the way over here.

That's according to the fourth-quarter 2010 e-crime report just issued by Internet Identity (IID), a Tacoma, Wash.-provider of online security services to financial institutions and other e-commerce enterprises.

The company said cyber fraudsters hacked the Internet domain of ChronoPay on Dec. 25 and 26, a domain name server attack that re-directed users to a bogus site and collected approximately 800 credit card numbers from customers.

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IID's president and chief technology officer, Rod Rasmussen, said that in addition to credit card and other account information, such attacks can net corporate e-mail, financial transactions and other sensitive data and result in serious loss of reputation and non-compliance penalties for the company involved if it occurred in the U.S.

"While we've been warning for years that DNS hijackings could result in financial disaster, we hadn't seen such a well-planned and successful attack of this nature until this incident," Rasmussen said.

The report also noted a holiday season spike in phishing attacks on e-commerce companies globally, up 13% from the previous quarter and 14% from the year-ago quarter.

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